Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in the Fair Trade Movement

By D. Jaffee. 2012

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The sociological literature on social movement organizations (SMOs) has come to recognize that under neoliberal globalization many SMOs have moved from an emphasis on the state as the locus of change toward a focus on corporations as targets. This shift has led some SMOs to turn to forms of market-based private regulatory action. The use of one such tactic—voluntary, third-party product certification—has grown substantially, as SMOs seek ways to hold stateless firms accountable. This article explores the case of the international fair trade movement, which aims to change the inequitable terms of global trade in commodities for small farmers, artisans, and waged laborers. Drawing from interviews with a range of fair trade participants, document analysis, and media coverage, the article describes fair trade's growing relationship with multinational coffee firms, particularly Starbucks and Nestle. It explores intra-movement conflicts over the terms for and the effects of corporate participation in fair trade, and illuminates tensions between conceptualizations of fair trade as movement, market, and system. The article makes two arguments. First, while fair trade has succeeded partially in reembedding market exchange within systems of social and moral relations, it has also proved susceptible to the power of corporate actors to disembed the alternative through a process of movement co-optation. Second, it argues that co-optation takes a unique form in the context of social movements whose principal tools to achieve social change are certification and labeling: it occurs primarily on the terrain of standards, in the form of weakening or dilution.

Subfields: Plant Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2fa11e6f1b9e7f3c4cc7837ad458a85ce9fbf003

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Citations in the corpus

Explaining the 'hungry farmer paradox': Smallholders and fair trade cooperatives navigate seasonality and change in Nicaragua's corn and coffee markets (2014, background): “20/lb) (Fairtrade International, 2011), a set price differential for certified organic production, annual audits to ensure transparency and accountability within the cooperatives, and selected standards for environmentally sustainable production (Jaffee, 2012).”
Linking Globalization to Local Land Uses: How Eco-Consumers and Gourmands are Changing the Colombian Coffee Landscapes (2013, background): “As international prices for coffee have started to recover, the effectiveness of the fair-trade price, established more than two decades ago, has come into question (Jaffee, 2012).”
Who Governs Socially-Oriented Voluntary Sustainability Standards? Not the Producers of Certified Products (2017, background): “…such as corporations, may co-opt less experienced or less wealthy stakeholders, such as small NGOs, pushing through weak regulations while touting NGO participation as a signal of legitimacy (Busch & Bain, 2004; Jaffee, 2012; Jaffee & Howard, 2009; Nelson & Tallontire, 2014; O’Rourke, 2006).”