Cooperate to Transform? Regional Cooperation in Community Supported Agriculture as a Driver of Resilient Local Food Systems

Rommel, Marius; Posse, Dirk; Wittkamp, Moritz; Paech, Niko

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-98617-9_22

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Various scholars have proposed strategies for establishing effective and legitimate telecoupled governance systems. This includes problem‐oriented research efforts (Cotta et al, 2022), the development of frameworks for quantifying the environmental impacts of telecoupling (Guo et al, 2021), and the formation of international communities (Rommel et al, 2019). Notably, Garrett and Rueda (2019) suggest the promotion of responsible and ethical consumption as a means to advance novel governance mechanisms for telecoupled systems, as consumers play a pivotal role in propelling voluntary environmental policies and standards within the business sector (Rueda et al, 2017).…”

Section: Achieving Sustainable Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and achieving sustainable consumption: Integrating international political economy and psychology perspectives

Liu

2023

Bus Strat Dev

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The concept of sustainable consumption has gained significant attention in international policy discussions. In order to achieve sustainable consumption, it is essential to thoroughly comprehend the underlying causes of current unsustainable consumption patterns and the associated challenges in transitioning to more sustainable practices. This research, employing perspectives from international political economy and psychology, elucidates that unsustainable consumption is rooted in a combination of systemic and individual factors. Systemic factors encompass unequal exchange relations, lack of efficient telecoupling framework, political and ecological trade‐off dilemma. Individual factors include unsatisfied needs, insufficient environmental concern, and low self‐efficacy. Drawing upon these findings, this study presents a comprehensive set of macro and micro‐level policy recommendations for achieving sustainable consumption and a more equitable and sustainable future.

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Section: Achieving Sustainable Consumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and achieving sustainable consumption: Integrating international political economy and psychology perspectives

Liu

2023

Bus Strat Dev

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“…Espelt [30] shows how CSAs around Barcelona use collaborative online tools to promote prosumer models. Rommel et al [7] uncover how German CSAs sometimes share resources and trade with conventional farms to diversify their output.…”

Section: Community-supported Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…These benefits and shortcomings are well-established, yet they are based predominantly on the performance of individual CSA initiatives. By contrast, we know surprisingly little about the extent to which CSAs can tackle these shortcomings by collaborating in larger networks and with other types of organisations, which could enable them to expand, diversify, and institutionally consolidate their practices [7]. This paper aims to alleviate this blind spot by investigating the scale, practices, and challenges of local CSA collaboration in Wales and central Germany.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Community-Supported Agriculture Networks in Wales and Central Germany: Scaling Up, Out, and Deep through Local Collaboration

Bonfert

2022

Sustainability

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Multiple systemic crises have highlighted the vulnerabilities of our globalised food system, raising the demand for more resilient and ecologically sustainable alternatives, and fuelling engagement in practices such as community-supported agriculture (CSA). In CSA, local farmers and households share the costs and products of farming, allowing them to organise food provision non-commercially around short supply chains. While this may prefigure alternatives to the dominant food system, CSA is considered limited in regard to its scalability and accessibility. While these shortcomings apply to individual CSAs, we know little about whether multi-CSA networks can tackle them by expanding and institutionalising their practices at scale. This paper alleviates this blind spot by investigating local CSA networks in Wales and Germany through a lens of ‘food movement networks’, identifying their scaling practices and encountered challenges. It draws on semi-structured interviews with CSA actors and observations at network gatherings. The paper shows that local collaboration enables CSAs to integrate their supply chains (scaling out), engage their communities (scaling deep), and participate in food councils (scaling up), while further networking at regional level helps new initiatives start up. It also reveals competitive tensions between neighbouring CSAs, which constitutes a hitherto unknown challenge to CSA’s potential scalability.

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“…In contrast, the Solawi network was born as a bottom-up response to the industrial, globalised agri-food system, which forces smallholders to grow and industrialise, as otherwise they are squeezed out of the market (Blättel-Mink et al 2017). Seeking to bring about a paradigm change towards a regional, ecologically sound, and socially responsible agriculture, the Solawi network promotes the spread of a CSA model, which isolates small-scale producers from market pressures: establishing a long-term producer-consumer partnership in which consumers collectively share the risks and costs of farming in return for a harvest share (Rommel et al 2022).…”

Section: Persisting Tension: Broad Versus Narrow Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…isolating small-scale producers from the pressures of the global market, CSA connects producers with consumers within their region, who commit to collectively bearing the costs and risks of agriculture in return for a share of the harvest(Bonfert 2022b;Rommel et al 2022). In many CSA initiatives, at least in Germany, consumers practise solidarity not only with producers (the German name of CSA is Solidarische Landwirtschaft [Solawi]-solidarity agriculture) but also among consumers, making the financial contributions dependent on a member's budget (through so-called 'contribution rounds')(Blättel-Mink et al 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

Nurturing networks

Guerrero Lara

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The political dimension of community-supported agriculture (CSA), beyond prefiguring alternatives to the conventional, capitalist agri-food system, has remained largely unexplored by the scientific community. The large majority of studies on CSA have explored questions on societal change by investigating the internal dynamics at the initiative level, and detailed explorations of CSA as a social movement as a whole are largely lacking. Therefore, this thesis studied the political dimension of CSA at the level of the network organisation by conceptualising and analysing CSA from a social movement lens. Such a perspective broadened the view beyond local initiatives and shed light on the role that CSA can play as a collective political actor to bring about change towards more environmentally sound and socially just agri-food systems. This study focussed on the German CSA network, the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, as the main case study and asked to what extent and in what ways CSA networks form and act as a collective, political actor of societal transformation. To answer this question, several chapters of this thesis drew on different strands of social movement studies: Chapter 3 used the concept of boundary work to shed light on the process through which CSA networks become a collective actor. Subsequently, drawing on literature on political advocacy, Chapter 4 analysed how CSA networks act via advocacy work to induce change within capitalist agri-food systems. Building on the literature on coalition building, Chapter 5 then investigated how political action can be broadened by systematically analysing the potential of entering a coalition between the CSA and degrowth movements. Finally, Chapter 6 examined the transformation of agri-food systems more broadly through the lens of degrowth literature and identified pertinent avenues for future research. Taken together, these chapters generate novel insights and positions on the German CSA network as a collective, yet heterogenous actor. Adopting a social movement lens was instrumental for exploring how CSA initiatives with differing values, ways of organising, and political goals are positioned towards each other, including how tensions and factionalism arise within the movement and how they are mitigated. Furthermore, this thesis showed that the German CSA network, apart from an outspoken distancing from the far-right, welcomes diversity; a pragmatic decision that has allowed the movement to grow and spread within different circles. The heterogeneity of the German CSA network is also reflected in its politics; while the network engages predominantly in a prefigurative politics, different understandings of what it means to be political co-exist within the movement. In addition, it is politicised to different extents and the extent to which the movement wants to be political remains internally contested and debated. While further politicisation is necessary to support societal transformation processes, for a social movement that consists of heterogenous initiatives, this process is complex and problem-ridden. In sum, this thesis gave a nuanced view of the ways in which CSA networks can be understood as political and offered important insights into how a common identity, political strategies, claims, and struggles are negotiated and enacted.

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Cooperate to Transform? Regional Cooperation in Community Supported Agriculture as a Driver of Resilient Local Food Systems

Cited by 11 publications

References 39 publications

Understanding and achieving sustainable consumption: Integrating international political economy and psychology perspectives

Understanding and achieving sustainable consumption: Integrating international political economy and psychology perspectives

Community-Supported Agriculture Networks in Wales and Central Germany: Scaling Up, Out, and Deep through Local Collaboration

Nurturing networks

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