We welcome you to join us for the last Winter Quarter meeting of the Money, Markets, and Governance Workshop, on Tuesday, Mar. 8th, 4:30PM – 6PM, at the Social Science Research Building room 401.
Tal Yifat
PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, The University of Chicago
Governing Sustainable Transactions: Scale and Sustainability in Agri-food Value Chains
Abstract: In agri-food value chains, achieving social empowerment and environmental sustainability at large scale creates major transaction coordination challenges that have rarely been recognized in the academic literature. Social empowerment, to the extent that it involves sourcing from independent small and mid-sized farms, depends on effective coordination of decentralized production by multiple autonomous suppliers. Environmental sustainability, to the extent that it embraces interdependence between a farm’s particular natural characteristics and the farming methods it employs, limits the ability to codify production practices. I explore these issues through an analysis of the dairy value chain of Organic Valley, an agricultural cooperative that realizes an ambitious social and environmental mission at large scale. Organic Valley solves coordination challenges using a configuration of transaction governance instruments that includes Empowered Participatory Governance (EPG), relational governance and standard-based governance. EPG (Fung & Wright 2003) involves broad bottom-up participation of farmers in deliberative decision making processes that address practical governance problems. The analysis demonstrates the potential of participatory, deliberative governance processes to not only promote economic democratization and social empowerment, but also increase adaptability to local contexts with their natural specificities. EPG offers advantages that improve competitiveness, including facilitating learning, generating well informed decisions, increasing decisions’ legitimacy and building trust and relational networks.
*** This workshop session will take the form of a talk / practice job-talk. Therefore there is no paper circulated ahead and there is be no discussant appointed ***
Questions about the workshop or accessibility concerns can be addressed to yanivr at uchicago dot edu