Avoiding Asda? Exploring consumer motivations in local organic good networks

Supermarkets such as Asda (owned by Wal-Mart) have responded to the growth in direct marketing and alternative agri-food networks by promoting local produce ranges, and increasingly sourcing organic produce from the UK. Thus consumers now have a choice of outlets for local and organic produce. This paper examines the implications of that choice for direct marketing in particular, and sustainable consumption in general. The paper tests the hypothesis that consumers make a conscious choice to engage in an alternative food network when they purchase through direct marketing channels, and that they are deliberately avoiding mainstream supermarkets. Research findings are presented from a survey of customers of a local organic food cooperative in Norfolk, UK which examines consumer motivations and perceptions of alternative and mainstream food provisioning. The hypothesis is confirmed: consumers expressed wide-ranging preferences for participation in the alternative food system, though there is some concern that the convenience and accessibility of supermarket provision of local and organic food threaten to erode the wider social and community benefits achieved by direct marketing initiatives

Preferences for Domestic Action Over International Transfers in Global Climate Policy

AbstractCost-effective and equitable climate change mitigation requires the transfer of resources from developed to developing countries. In two behavioral experiments, we demonstrate that American subjects act according to a strong home preference, by making private donations and writing letters in support of public spending more often for mitigation programs located at home versus those overseas. We attempt to overcome the preference to act at home by randomly informing some subjects that foreign programs are more cost-effective than domestic programs. Home preference is mitigated only in the case of private donations. From a separate experimental treatment, we show that the preference against foreign programs is exacerbated when the co-benefits of mitigation programs are made salient. Importantly, home preference crosses party lines, indicating that it is a deep-seeded, affective preference. These findings highlight significant political obstacles to international cooperation on climate change that relies on transfers

Establishing a Sustainable Development Goal for Oceans and Coasts to Face the Challenges of our Future Ocean

Oceans regulate our climate, provide us with natural resources such as food, materials, substances, and energy and are essential for international trade, recreational, and cultural activities. Free access to and availability of ocean resources and services, together with human development, have put strong pressures on marine ecosystems, ranging from overfishing and reckless resource extraction to various channels of careless pollution. International cooperation and negotiations are required to protect the marine environment and use marine resources in a way that the needs of future generations will be met. For that purpose, developing and agreeing on a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Oceans and Coasts could be an essential element for sustainable ocean management. The SDGs will build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and replace them by 2015. Even though ensuring environmental sustainability is one of the eight MDG goals, the ocean is not explicitly included. Furthermore, the creation of a comprehensive underlying set of oceanic sustainability indicators would help assessing the current status of marine systems, diagnose on-going trends, and provide information for forward-locking and sustainable ocean governance

Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Ideas about social policy and its role in development have shifted over time, signaling the difficulty of finding clarity in approaches to social investment, poverty alleviation, and equity. In consequence, research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of "things that need to be done," along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. While these legacies contribute to the difficulty of developing overarching solutions to problems of social development and poverty alleviation, they also suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce what is often an overwhelming social policy agenda. The development community needs to get much better at matching ideas to realities, at considering how policy priorities could be assessed in terms of contextually specific feasibility, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step. While these are less ambitious questions than are often asked, they hold some promise of bringing ideas into better touch with the real world.

Social Policy in Development: Coherence and Cooperation in the Real World

Research and practice related to social policy and poverty alleviation have left a legacy of a very broad agenda of “things that need to be done”, along with important unanswered questions about how to integrate social and economic development. These suggest the fruitfulness of focusing more on the distinctions among countries, in terms of their capacities, generating ideas about priorities and sequences, and working to reduce the agenda. Instead of new big ideas and new paradigms, the development community needs to get better at matching ideas to realities, and at generating contextually grounded processes for taking the next step.social policy, economic development history; poverty policy; development agenda; development cooperation