Researchers have long debated how to balance agricultural productivity with socio-environmental conflicts, highlighting the impact of agrochemical use on biodiversity, water quality, and public health. While current approaches suggest that collective action among farmers could offer a viable solution, less attention has been given to how indigenous communities, historically known for communal management and reciprocal institutions, now operate within mixed systems of traditional and modern practices. These communities face dilemmas that hinder collective action and contradict their worldviews. This study addresses these gaps by examining the institutional and social factors obstructing collective action among Aymara farmers in northern Chile, showing how market-driven individualism undermines their reciprocal institutions, cultural knowledge, and communal interests.
Through semi-structured interviews with extension agents, government officials, and focus groups with Indigenous farmers in Azapa, Camarones, and Codpa, this research identifies critical factors that weaken sustainability. The findings reveal that deep-rooted distrust in institutional support, particularly after previous collective initiatives failed, has led to a retreat towards individual decision-making. In Azapa, market-driven intensive agriculture has entrenched agrochemical use, prioritizing homogeneity, volume, risk aversion, and short-term economic gains. In Camarones, while traditional Indigenous practices are more common, farmers feel torn between modernizing practices and preserving their traditional lifestyle. Migration and intermittent land use complicate coordination and collective decision-making, reinforcing the perception that individual decisions are more feasible. Codpa exhibits a blend of these dynamics, where traditional practices are increasingly abandoned in favor of competitive, high-input approaches driven by global market pressures. The lack of trust in collective solutions and fear of losing autonomy have hindered effective cooperation networks. Across all territories, the erosion of traditional ecological and cultural knowledge further complicates efforts to promote collective action.
This research provides evidence that fragmented participation and economic dependencies weaken the potential of collective action as a solution to environmental issues. Additionally, it suggests that sustainable agricultural transitions require rebuilding trust in local governance and actively integrating Indigenous knowledge systems before it is too late.
Farming in the Jura mountains, both in France and Switzerland, has for centuries specialised in dairy cows, whose milk is used to make renowned cheeses, recognised by protected designations of origin (7 PDOs in total). More than a billion litres of milk are produced every year and 100,000 tonnes of cheese are made by a community of 3,500 farms, 220 cheese dairies (mainly village cooperatives) and around 40 ripeners.
Despite the presence of a national border, there are major similarities in the agricultural and socio-economic practices and challenges faced by these mid-mountain regions. All these cheese PDOs are governed by powerful and democratic inter-professional organisations. Although they do not all have the same economic dimension, Le Gruyère Suisse and Comté have a decisive weight due to their importance both in terms of volumes produced and the respective specifications.
To discuss and demonstrate a mode of function and regulation based on the management of a ‘common’, the approach is organised in three parts. The first presents the organisation of a cheese production system based on a technical division of labour within collective production units, generally cooperatives, where the pooling and mixing of milk is compulsory. The second explores the relationship between the terroir and the production area, and shows that the heterogeneity of natural conditions and the presence of remarkable ecological environments contribute to the expression of the typicality of cheeses. Finally, beyond the production system, the identity of cheeses and their associated landscapes is used by civil society, local residents and stakeholders. This ‘cheesemaking’ community is a key component of tourist activities, gastronomy, local society and its cultural attachment to the area, as demonstrated by the appeal of agricultural shows and cheese fairs and competitions.
The current rate of agricultural soils degradation worldwide is turning soil health and its sustainable management a research frontier and focus of global concern. In the European Union, an estimated 60-70% of agricultural soils are considered unhealthy for food production as a direct result of unsustainable practices, compounded by increasing extreme climate events and biodiversity loss. This paper tackles two fundamental epistemological challenges that soil health, a relatively newcomer in soil science, still faces, hindering wider and urgent sustainability transformations and pathways. On the one hand, the lack of robust approaches quantitatively linking soil health status with soil ecological functions, creates vagueness for determining locally-adapted combinations of sustainable crop-livestock farming practices. On the other hand, such vagueness embeds into larger social-ecological dynamic uncertainties related to the governance of soil health innovations and their diffusion processes. The general challenge here is how to spark local cooperation for navigating landscape-level transformations in traditional cultural settings and contexts characterized by: (1) intricate and diverse combinations of value-chain, industrial, financial and political interests, values and beliefs across multiple policy domains; (2) institutional inertia creating both sectoral and system-level lock-ins, self-reinforcing situations where opportunity and potential for change gets minimized. Here, I present a diagnostic multi-functional approach, tested with local communities from five European agricultural Living Labs, to co-design place-based governance models for steering adaptive innovation processes in complex social-ecological contexts affected by lock-in phenomena. The approach operates under agroecological tenets and a regenerative paradigm, conceived as a desired outcome of transformative processes. The theoretical framework underlying the diagnostic approach combines elements from hybrid governance models, with a conceptual core based on Ostromian commons-protective principles. The latter aid participants in exploring an understanding of soil ecosystems and resources as a commons, instead of a black box under our feet linked to the land property regime.
Agri-food stakeholders in value chains face interdependences, path dependence and partly unforeseeable social-ecological feedbacks. This renders transformative pathways uncertain and unpredictable. As problem domain impeding or empowering stakeholders to implement sustainable practices, value chains are a scaling-up and scaling-deep meso-level where institutional coordination has the potential to address this issue. Yet, the contextualized fit of agri-food value chain meso-level coordination for sustainability transformation is everything but straightforward. Coordination initiatives for sustainability amplification unfold from mixed institutional logics and rely on incumbent institutional developments. This leads to an important diversity of possible institutional pathways towards sustainability amplification. The paper takes stock of the research gaps identified in the institutional, innovation and social-ecological literature. These literature streams stress the need to address the institutional fit of value chain organisation for sustainability amplification through contextualized assessment of the stakeholders’ coordination. To this end, the paper considers how to theoretically anchor a model of value chain organizing (MVCO) from a contextualized combination of complex features of institutional coordination. We propose a configurational MVCO articulating variables and outcomes of contextual fit in their static and dynamic interplay. We discuss this model’s significance from an explanatory, interpretative and emancipatory theorizing perspective. We identify the adaptive potential of the model for further inquiry on stakeholders’ coordination in agri-food and beyond, across investigate practices ranging from (inter)disciplinary to transdisciplinary research endeavors.
The paper explores how two self-legislated mechanisms, the participatory-guarantee-system and the collaborative price-mechanism, contribute to manifest an ecological ethos in food production systems on the example of the farmer’s association CampiAperti in Bologna, Italy. Through the lens of social reproduction (Fraser 2017), I apply its main critic of unpaid care work on farming. I argue that the feminist perspective in combination with commoning enables farmers to re-valorise care work in farming and can constitute conditions and methods that are conducive for implementing animal welfare and soil care. Following the notion of commoning as a social activity (De Angelis 2017), I will show how the self-certified PGS provides a fertile ground for altering the production system as well as it enforces the development of reciprocal relations manifesting mutual support, empowerment and trust (Diesner 2023). Further, there is a need for developing a new metrics for earning a livelihood that mirrors ecological production standards in order to avoid the capitalist logic of endless profit accumulation through the exploitation of animals, the soil and labour. In this light, the paper discusses the introduced collaborative price-mechanism by the farmers in conjunction with the necessity to self-govern their own markets. I will elaborate on the challenges of how care work in farming is evaluated when establishing a ‘just price’ (Edelman 2005), and elaborate on the difficulty in coalescing the ecological and economic dimension, also in relation to making local, organic food affordable. The paper concludes that commoning from a feminist perspective enforces the ecological ethos and economic dimensions in autonomous food production systems.
References
De Angelis, M. (2017) Omnia Sunt Comunia. On the Commons and Post-capitalist Transformation.London: Zed Books.
Diesner, D. (2023) Commoning the food system: Barriers, opportunities and resilience strategies in the case of CampiAperti, Bologna, Italy. (unpublished PhD-Thesis).
Edelman, M. (2005) ‘Bringing the Moral Economy back in to the Study of 21st-Century
Transnational Peasant Movements, Social Movement Studies’, American Anthropologist, 107(3), pp. 331-345.
Fraser, N. (2017) ‘Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism’, in Battacharya, T. (ed.) Social Reproduction Theory. Remapping class, recentering oppression. London: Pluto Press Ch.2, pp. 21-36.
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