The prize committee is pleased to announce that Anja Bless’ article, titled ‘The co-optation of regenerative agriculture: revisiting the corporate environmental food regime’, published in the journal Globalizations, has won the 2025 Australian International Political Economy Network (AIPEN) Richard Higgott Journal Article Prize.
The committee commended the article for its outstanding quality, noting the depth of research, theoretical novelty, and timeliness in drawing attention to the challenges of global food security.
The article is theoretically novel, linking the scholarship on corporate power with food regime theory in an innovative way. The committee commends Bless’ extensive and rigorous empirical research, which has been presented in a compelling and highly engaging manner. The author makes an important contribution to critical literatures of green capitalism, pushing beyond a simplistic analysis of greenwashing, to understand the ways in which sustainability claims open up new opportunities for accumulation.
Finally, the judges noted that while the article offers significant insights for scholars of corporate power and the global food system governance, it also has great applicability to broader IPE fields and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars.
It is for these reasons, the committee concludes that Bless’ article deserves recognition, and we invite the broader AIPEN community to engage with the intellectual contributions of this work. Congratulations once again to Anja!
The prize will be awarded at the AIPEN workshop in Brisbane in 2026, and the author will be invited to write a post on their winning article for the Progress in Political Economy blog.
Additionally, the prize committee would like to congratulate the authors of the three other shortlisted articles; the committee was very impressed by their work. All three articles addressed urgent and important questions in IPE.
Past awardees
2025 Anja Bless, ‘The co-optation of regenerative agriculture: revisiting the corporate environmental food regime’, Globalizations, 22(4), 590-612.
2024 Elliot Dolan-Evans, ‘Pipes, profits and peace: toward a feminist political economy of gas during war’, Review of International Political Economy, 30:2 (2023).
2023 Ainsley Elbra, John Mikler and Hannah Murphy-Gregory, ‘The Big Four and corporate tax governance: From global dis-harmony to national regulatory incrementalism’, Global Policy, 14:1 (2023).
2022 Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri, ‘COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state’, Review of International Political Economy, 29:4 (2022).
2021 Melissa Johnston, ‘Frontier Finance: The Role of Microfinance in Debt and Violence in Post-conflict Timor-Leste’, Review of International Political Economy, 27:6 (2020).
2020 Claire Parfitt, ‘ESG Integration Treats Ethics as Risk, but Whose Ethics and Whose Risk? Responsible Investment in the Context of Precarity and Risk-Shifting’, Critical Sociology, 46:4-5 (2020).
2019 Linda Weiss and Elizabeth Thurbon, “Power Paradox: How the Extension of US Infrastructural Power Abroad Diminishes State Capacity at Home.” Review of International Political Economy 25:6 (2018).
2018 Maria Tanyag, ‘Invisible Labor, Invisible Bodies: How the Global Political Economy Affects Reproductive Freedom in the Philippines’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 19:1 (2017).
2017 Samanthi J. Gunawardana, ‘“To Finish, We Must Finish”: Everyday Practices of Depletion in Sri Lankan Export-Processing Zones”, Globalizations, 13:6 (2016).
2016 Gareth Bryant, Siddhartha Dabhi and Steffen Böhm, ‘“Fixing” the Climate Crisis: Capital, States and Carbon Offsetting in India’, Environment and Planning A, 47:10 (2015).
2015 Ainsley Elbra, ‘Interests Need Not be Pursued If They Can be Created: Private Governance in African Gold Mining’, Business and Politics, 16:2 (2014).
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