Conference Agenda

While certification of voluntary sustainability standards remains an important strategy to promote sustainability of agri-food value chains, various alternative and complementary governance approaches have emerged in recent years. These include increasingly common inclusive business schemes, such as company-owned responsible sourcing programmes, or purchasing practices aiming to eliminate unnecessary intermediaries, often referred to as ‘direct trade’. Finally, also producer cooperatives and other organizations (co-)owned by producers have developed sophisticated governance strategies, as well as social enterprises whose purpose and business model centres around promoting producers’ well-being or another societal goal.

This growing institutional diversity creates an empirical and theoretical challenge of mapping the range of governance actors and strategies, including the goals, theories of change, and precise instruments they deploy to achieve those goals. Existing typologies of value chain governance remain at a broad level, without disentangling the institutional details regarding, e.g., ownership, voice, and the distribution of benefits, risks, and costs. Moreover, expanding the scope of governance actors from mainly buyers and certifiers to producer organizations reflects an important shift that may not only reveal innovative ‘bottom-up’ strategies including producer-led value chain upgrading and coordination between like-minded actors, but also a more diverse range of goals, instruments and theories of change that go above and beyond dominant strategies of sustainability or supply chain governance.

This paper addresses this challenge by developing a typology of value chain governance actors and strategies based on the results of an extensive survey (n = 120) of organizations in Peru and Switzerland that are involved in the production, processing, trading, selling, and certification of coffee and cacao and derived products. It discusses how actors’ ownership and organizational mission may affect the choice of governance strategies, and which strategies in contrast are used by a wide range of actors.

Production and trade of agricultural commodities such as coffee, cocoa, palm oil or soy are key drivers of deforestation and poverty traps. Therefore, companies, cooperatives and other private-sector actors experiment with diverse governance strategies. The most pertinent governance strategies include certification schemes, inclusive business and solidarity economy. Many of such strategies are underpinned by a theory of change, i.e. a causal model explaining how and why certain activities trigger certain outcomes and impacts for sustainable development, and which causal pathways to impact they expect. Different theories of change posit hypotheses that are partly compatible and partly incompatible with each other, even though multiple governance strategies interact with each other in shaping commodity supply chains and landscapes. However, the precise complementarities and antagonisms of multiple theories of change behind private sustainability governance strategies of agricultural commodities remain elusive.

Therefore, this contribution aims to increase our precision about theories of change that explain how, why and under which conditions private sustainability governance can overcome deforestation and poverty traps. Analytically, we adopt a theory of change methodology. Empirically, we draw on a survey of theories of change with n=85 companies and cooperatives along all stages of cocoa and coffee supply chains, which adopt certification, inclusive business and solidarity economy strategies in the cocoa and coffee sectors in Peru and Switzerland.

Our results show that, first, the private governance strategies differ significantly in terms of key actors, activities and involved stakeholders as well as their underlying rationales and entry points in supply chains. Second, despite this diversity there are archetypical causal mechanisms that explain how and why particular strategies generate particular outcomes. Third, using causal influence diagrams, we identify conditions that influence effectiveness of particular strategies, and we identify reinforcing and counteracting dynamics in theories of change of different governance strategies. Finally, we contrast the empirically identified theories of change used by actors in cocoa and coffee sectors with selected prominent theories of sustainability governance scholarship.

In 2021, Switzerland produced 369,116 tonnes of meat and 3.8 million tonnes of milk. The production of these industrial quantities of meat and milk relies heavily on the use of concentrated feed (e.g., soy), most of it imported (e.g., from Brazil).

The chains through which Switzerland is supplied with soy for animal husbandry are not well understood, due to a lack of transparency. This makes it difficult to assess the sustainability of Swiss meat and milk production, on the one hand, and the effectiveness of international and domestic measures aimed at making Swiss meat and milk production more sustainable, on the other. Both the positive impacts (e.g., incomes for actors along the supply chains) and the negative impacts (e.g., deforestation) of Swiss soy imports remain unclear.

This paper has two objectives. The first is to bring clarity to Swiss soy-feed supply chains using available databases and literature. We identify key actors, processes, and contexts (e.g., regional/global food systems) and map their multi-level interactions. Our analysis reveals where knowledge gaps exist and where greater transparency is needed.

The second objective is to envision and test international and domestic processes through which the identified transparency needs could be realized (e.g., changes in public opinion, regulatory changes, changes in trade policy). We approach this challenge through modelling. We also envision and test alternative pathways for improving the sustainability of Swiss meat and milk production (e.g., dietary changes). By analyzing alternatives, we thereby assess the impacts of transparency vis-à-vis other strategies. We also consider how transparency-based strategies could interact with other strategies (e.g., revealing negative sustainability impacts could promote dietary changes) and how unintended consequences (e.g., unjust impacts on marginalized actors along the supply chains) could arise and be mitigated or avoided.

Our study highlights the impacts and limitations of transparency and suggests new strategies through which a relatively small player, such as Switzerland, could promote sustainability in supply chains that are embedded in regional and global food systems.

Cross-sector partnerships are often conceptualized as part of a ‘deliberative turn’: attempts to democratize decision-making to enhance legitimacy and foster effective solutions. The understanding of deliberative democracy has primarily been developed with reference to the political sphere. However, over the past decades the concept has been applied to collaborative efforts to connect and coordinate investment and innovation processes in the private sphere, in an attempt to solve collective problems and enable transformative change. Deliberation in these processes has been studied to some degree, most notably through work on transnational environmental governance. In this paper, however, we focus on deliberative processes in local-level inclusive agribusiness partnerships in Africa. These partnerships are increasingly promoted as a tool to support sector transformation, through inclusion of marginalized actors as suppliers, processors, distributors, and/or consumers, and in doing so address environmental, food security, and equity goals. Deliberation is understood to be a central element of this transformation. Yet, the setting of these partnerships is not obviously conducive to deliberation, as they are characterized by power differences and set in unfavorable cultural and political contexts. Therefore, our study aims to explore the conditions influencing the character and quality of deliberative processes in inclusive agribusiness partnerships in Africa.

From the literature, we identify four elements that influence the quality of deliberation: (1) Deliberative context, and especially the dominant norms of political and economic coordination and decision-making; (2) Incentives for deliberation, or the perceived degree of issue salience and consequentiality; (3) Properties of the deliberating actors; participants’ relative resources, capacity and power to deliberate, ideological distinctions and trust barriers; and (4) Properties of the deliberative forum; the design, arrangements and resources that shape the nature of deliberation. These categories form the basis of our analysis of deliberation within twelve agri-business partnerships. Our case studies are selected to provide different configurations of factors relevant to deliberation, e.g. domestic deliberative norms, informed by a country’s degree of democracy and press freedom, and its score on the Varieties of Democracy index. This resulted in selecting a variety of partnerships from Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Ghana. Based on our analysis, we produce a framework of conditions influencing deliberative capacity in the context of agri-business partnerships. Our findings suggest that despite the conditions for deliberation being largely unfavorable in the researched partnerships, partnership facilitators and participants employed a range of mechanisms to at least partially mitigate these issues, with varying outcomes.