Building alternative agri-food networks: Certification, embeddedness and agri-environmental governance

By Vaughan Higgins, Jacqueline Lineton Dibden, C. Cocklin. 2008

258 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper examines the role of certification in alternative agri-food networks (AAFNs), which are in the process of building markets for their produce outside conventional supply chains. Drawing upon recent writing on 'embeddedness', we argue that certification provides an important focus for exploring the relationship and tensions between horizontal and vertical dimensions of embedding processes, and thereby understanding the complexities of agri-environmental governance. Through a case study of a group of beef farmers in south-eastern Australia, we investigate how one type of process-based certification—Environmental Management Systems (EMSs)—was used as the basis for constructing an AAFN and selling a premium environmentally certified product. The case study shows that environmental certification had mixed results for this AAFN. For instance, while it represented a useful means of building consumer trust, considerable time and effort was required by producers to target and build a market for the certified product. Producers initially had little to gain financially from a third-party-certified EMS. However, despite the current lack of broad consumer demand for non-organic environmentally certified products, the farmers we interviewed did not reject the EMS process entirely—they used it to realise a range of non-monetary personal and community benefits. We conclude that certification can be a useful strategy for those AAFNs in the process of expanding beyond direct marketing. Nevertheless, the lack of consumer understanding and demand means that certification may be adapted and combined with other producer strategies to meet personal and societal expectations regarding land stewardship.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/093af4ab0ef8c09ba4917e254ed6cfc20c38c440

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Plant Science

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Building Food Democracy: Exploring Civic Food Networks and Newly Emerging Forms of Food Citizenship (2012, background): “…of food as the exploration of the economic, political and social relations that characterize several forms of direct and proximate selling (Higgins et al., 2008) has grown consistently in recent years (e.g. Hinrichs, 2003; DuPuis and Goodman, 2005; Feagan, 2007; Holloway et al., 2007;…”
Farm to school programs: exploring the role of regionally-based food distributors in alternative agrifood networks (2010, background): “The perspectives of the four regionally-based food distributors profiled here support the notion of hybridity that various scholars suggest characterizes AAFNs and provide further evidence that these organizational forms are not made up of actors with ‘‘common ideological objectives’’ (Goodman 2004;”
Growing local food: scale and local food systems governance (2012, background): “These words echo others who have problematized such characterizations as insufficiently nuanced (Goodman 2004; Higgins et al. 2008; Hinrichs 2000; Sonnino and Marsden 2006; Winter 2003).”