Sustainability: A tool for governing wine production in New Zealand?

Governance mechanisms facilitate sustainability transitions by ensuring that people are engaging in socially and environmentally sound practice. This paper analyses the history of the New Zealand wine industry over the past twenty years to trace how agricultural actors handle regulatory and voluntary modes of environmental governance and navigate between them. The empirical basis for the paper comprises 22 semi-structured interviews with industry actors addressing the ‘Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand’ programme. This qualitative methodology facilitated the collection of historical data as well as the interrogation of the meanings interviewees attributed to particular events, practices or behaviours. A narrative analysis examined how interviewees situated themselves in relation with the sustainability programme and their wider environment. The research identifies the key moments that lead the industry to ground its environmentalism in markets, and to coordinate wine production practice through associated auditing. The historical development of the programme suggests that this was achieved through the industry's wholesale adoption of what had been a voluntary programme. The analysis also reveals that diverse actors involved in New Zealand wine production refer to similar intertwining narratives about the programme that demonstrate a shift from a voluntary to a de facto compulsory scheme. We argue that actors have acquiesced to the expansion of the programme, allowing it to shape wine production in New Zealand. In this context, winegrowers and winemakers relate to the sustainability programme as simultaneously a regulatory and a market-motivated form of governance. The findings provide insight to how collective market strategies paired with sustainability assessments can create a new kind of governance mechanism that bridges economic and social spheres

When experts disagree: the need to rethink indicator selection for assessing sustainability of agriculture

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Sustainability indicators are well recognized for their potential to assess and monitor sustainable development of agricultural systems. A large number of indicators are proposed in various sustainability assessment frameworks, which raises concerns regarding the validity of approaches, usefulness and trust in such frameworks. Selecting indicators requires transparent and well-defined procedures to ensure the relevance and validity of sustainability assessments. The objective of this study, therefore, was to determine whether experts agree on which criteria are most important in the selection of indicators and indicator sets for robust sustainability assessments. Two groups of experts (Temperate Agriculture Research Network and New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard) were asked to rank the relative importance of eleven criteria for selecting individual indicators and of nine criteria for balancing a collective set of indicators. Both ranking surveys reveal a startling lack of consensus amongst experts about how best to measure agricultural sustainability and call for a radical rethink about how complementary approaches to sustainability assessments are used alongside each other to ensure a plurality of views and maximum collaboration and trust amongst stakeholders. To improve the transparency, relevance and robustness of sustainable assessments, the context of the sustainability assessment, including prioritizations of selection criteria for indicator selection, must be accounted for. A collaborative design process will enhance the acceptance of diverse values and prioritizations embedded in sustainability assessments. The process by which indicators and sustainability frameworks are established may be a much more important determinant of their success than the final shape of the assessment tools. Such an emphasis on process would make assessments more transparent, transformative and enduring