Wachstumsunabhängigkeit durch Soziale Innovationen?

Tschumi, Pascal; Winiger, Andrea; Wirth, Samuel; Mayer, Heike; Seidl, Irmi

doi:10.1515/9783839451809-009

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…). Yet, degrowth cannot be reduced to a call for negative GDP growth (D'Alisa, Demaria, highlighting examples for their alignment with degrowth values (Bloemmen et al 2015;Tschumi et al 2019;Cristiano et al 2021). These studies did not provide insights into why this alignment has not led to any form of political collaboration or mutual interest.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Tschumi et al (2019), for instance, depict CSA initiatives as unknowingly practising a degrowth business model. They identify a CSA initiative in a Swiss mountain region as a 'growth-independent' initiative; a quality rooted in the initiative's (1) transformation of consumers into prosumers and (2) establishment of short supply chains with strong ties between all the involved actors, allowing for (i) low shares of, or interest-free, borrowed capital, (ii) the possibility of replacing high capital input costs with manual labour, and (iii) a 'purchase' guarantee for the produced, Edwards and Espelt (2021) make a more extensive case for the relevance of CSA for degrowth, specifying CSA 29 as 'sharing a degrowth philosophy in terms of supporting quality human relationships […] democracy, sustainability and justice' (ibid., 129), as 'nurtur[ing] good intentions between country and city, promoting an ethical, local, degrowth lifestyle' (ibid., 130) and as being political in the sense of 'stimulat[ing] goals of the social and solidarity economy' (ibid., 131).Cristiano et al's (2021) contribution to Food for Degrowth, then, sets a limit to the alignment between CSA and degrowth.…”

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confidence: 99%

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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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Nurturing networks

Guerrero Lara

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A one-sided love affair? On the potential for a coalition between degrowth and community-supported agriculture in Germany

Spanier,

Guerrero Lara,

Feola

2023

Agric Hum Values

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Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a grassroots response to the threat the global industrial agri-food system poses to smallholders. The degrowth community, calling for a radical transformation away from the environmentally destructive and socially unjust primacy of economic growth in current societies, has started to pay tribute to CSA, commonly considering it an embodiment of degrowth ideas. However, the CSA movement does not reciprocate the interest of the degrowth community. This article therefore undertakes a systematic analysis of the potential for a coalition between CSA and degrowth in Germany. We draw on social movement theories to compare both movements’ ideological and strategic alignment, as well as the conducive and/or hindering factors for coalition building. We find that the ideologies and political strategies of the two movements are not aligned, which manifests in their main frames and action repertoires, among other areas, which are articulated at different levels of abstraction; CSA has a practical focus on the safeguarding of smallholder agriculture, while degrowth more abstractly centres on the growth-dependent economy. Scarce resources, differing forms of internal organisation, and a lack of knowledge about degrowth on the side of CSA represent further obstacles to entering a coalition. At the same time, our analysis shows existing social ties and an initial ideological alignment between the CSA movement and sufficiency-oriented degrowth. We conclude that, despite prevailing differences, the two movements seem complementary, and that entering a coalition would bring with it the benefits of combining practice- and discourse-driven social change.

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