Commodification and commercialisation in California's emerging licit cannabis sector

Commodification and commercialisation in California's emerging licit
cannabis sector: how can "late legalisers" balance a thriving market with
other social goods?The project speaks clearly to CDD's grand challenge of understanding
"how communities navigate different structures of power through their
systems of governance and processes of development". Adam proposes to
research California's licit cannabis sector: the state is simultaneously the
largest producer globally and a 'late legaliser' in the US context. It therefore
faces the tension between facilitating commercial interests and their
commodificatory instincts with protecting other goods such as social justice
and public health to a greater degree than elsewhere while also being able
to learn from pioneers. For the artisanal producers who built California's
illicit cannabis industry under prohibition, legalisation threatens to
undermine their citizenship and development. Alongside elite interviews,
Adam will work with activist cultivators such as Humboldt Farmers who are
navigating these livelihood pressures in real time. The project therefore fits
with all three CDD themes: civil society, by highlighting the experiences of a
social group who are potentially marginalised by an ostensibly liberating
process of legal change; development, by situating California's pastoral
political economy of cannabis within wider debates about the evolution of
global prohibition; and, by examining how this affects their democratic
rights as civil actors, it will have much to say about democracy too.