Dimensions of Power in Regulatory Regime Selection: Shopping, Shaping, and Staying

This article investigates the process through which transnational firms select and develop sites for their operations. I build a framework to understand how firms' localization strategies not only entail a choice among regulatory regimes but how they also coproduce those regimes while responding to community resistance. My account is based on a multisited ethnography of two research and development hubs for the U.S. corn seed market. The genetically modified (GM) corn seed industry is an important (and somewhat unusual) case because firms' competitiveness hinges on staying in particular environments, rendering them relatively place-bound—which can be used by local actors as a negotiating tool for better environmental and labor arrangements. I compare two cases of firms' localization strategies—one (Hawaii) in which firms are confronted by local actors who question GM crop safety and another (Puerto Rico) in which firms face little local opposition and, in fact, are lauded as economic engines of development. My work shows that firms' success hinges on balancing a site's natural endowments with its sociopolitical and regulatory constraints. Contrasting approaches that view firms' localization as a single moment of decision making, I conceptualize localization as a multistep process of negotiating a regulatory regime with local institutions—not just shopping for the right environment but shaping it and actively taking actions to stay there. In proposing a power-sensitive approach to location and regulation theory, my work highlights sociohistorical patterns of inequality, contributing to our understanding of how corporate localization strategies affect local control over environmental governance.