De Herde, Véronique

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.