The Making of Socio-ecological Resilience Requisite Variety as a Condition for Addressing a Global Banana Disease

The spread of Panama disease, caused by the soil-borne fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc), threatens banana production in plantations, smallholder farms, or backyards in the Philippines. This threat cuts across organizational boundaries and urges different actors to respond. Most likely, different organisational actors will first act in line with their own logics, preferred solutions, or management styles. However, the threat posed by boundary-crossing plant diseases also has a systemic dimension and the scale makes it relevant to identify places to intervene in the system. The notion of socio-ecological resilience asks the question whether the system, connecting distinct organizational actors with biological properties of the disease, has the ability to cope with change and continue to develop. This translates into an interest in understanding whether such a threat catalyses renewal and innovation or whether institutional rigidity obstructs this. The use of business system thinking, connecting rules and practicesin private and public realms, and innovation system thinking, exposing mediating, feedback and selection mechanisms, supports an integrative approach to identifying institutional conditions under which socio-ecological resilience is made or obstructed. This discussion is rooted in co-evolutionary thinking, which emphasises requisite variety of organisational actors and pathways as a condition for making resilience and deviating from locked-in R&D processes. Therefore, it seems relevant to determine whether the required variety of pathways, interests, and perspectives is in place for constituting socio-ecological resilience and human capacity to manage diseases, especially when export-oriented plantations operate adjacent to neighbouring small-scale farms producing for export or domestic markets and backyard gardens producing banana as food crop

Scaling service delivery in a failed state: cocoa smallholders, Farmer Field Schools, persistent bureaucrats and institutional work in Côte d’Ivoire

Author Addendum Article; Published online: 27 October 2016The increased use of sustainability standards in the international trade in cocoa challenges companies to find effective modes of service delivery to large numbers of small-scale farmers. A case study of the Sustainable Tree Crops Program targeting the small-scale cocoa producers in Côte d’Ivoire supplying international commodity markets shifts attention from mechanisms of private governance to the embedding of service delivery in the institutional dynamics of the state. It demonstrates that, despite a recent history of violent conflict and civil unrest, the introduced Farmer Field Schools programme achieved a surprising scale in terms of numbers and geographical spread. The analysis of this outcome combines political science and anthropological studies of effective and developmental elements in the state with the interest in institutional work found in organization science. The scaling of a new form of service delivery is explained by the skillful practices of institutional work by managers of a public–private partnership. They have been professionally associated with the sector for a long time and had the capacity to embed new forms of service delivery in persistent pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness in a failed state

Connecting the Concepts of Frugality and Inclusion to Appraise Business Practices in Systems of Food Provisioning:A Kenyan Case Study

Small and medium size business enterprises (SMEs) are the linchpin in systems of food provisioning in sub-Saharan Africa. These businesses occupy the middle of the agri-food chain and face a food security conundrum: they must ensure that smallholder producers of limited means can operate under fair terms while low-income consumers are supplied with affordable and nutritious food. This task becomes even more challenging when resources are scarce. This paper explores how resource-constrained SMEs arrange the terms on which both farmers and consumers are included in agri-food chains. To this end, it combines the concept of inclusion with that of frugality. We use the case of a Kenyan SME to demonstrate how a focus on frugality can advance our understanding of how business practices create thriving business relationships with smallholders while simultaneously ensuring access to affordable food for consumers. We additionally identify what conditions for inclusion emerge from this type of dynamic business practices. Our perspective departs from assessing induced organisational interventions, such as contract farming or cooperatives, which deliberately shorten the agri-food chain, thereby overlooking the skilful practices being employed by business actors in the middle of the chain.</p

Value chain governance

This document reports on the discussions during the dinner event held in November 2008. We believe that these discussions and the conversations with the co-applicants set clear directions for next phases of this project. In the first half of 2009, the researchers will be invited to help write evidence-based inputs. In the second half of 2009, we hope to meet all participants again for bilateral discussions. At the beginning of 2010 we aim to organise a final conference on the results of this search for coherencies and synergies between business, policy, practice and research

A Study on the Reproduction of Life in Agriculture

markdownabstractThe past two decades saw a rapid proliferation of sustainability standards created by multi-stakeholder partnerships of multinationals and international NGOs. This paper argues that the transformative capacity of these global partnerships to bring about sustainable change largely depends on how well the institutional features of global sustainability standards fit local organizational fields. This paper therefore aims to unravel the dynamics of global-local interactions. To this end, the concept of institutional fit is operationalized to assess whether and how the technical, cultural and political characteristics intrinsic to global sustainability standards are able to connect to local projects, strategies and practices. The introduction of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s standard into the Indonesian shrimp sector is used as a case to investigate these interactions. This paper shows that a process of fitting occurs when provisional institutions generated within a global partnership can be modified. We argue that global sustainability standards can benefit from steering more explicitly on dovetailing regulative and normative structures of global and local organizational fields. Local NGOs can play important mediating roles in this regard, which can potentially increase the transformative capacity of global standards in terms of generating and accelerating sustainable change

Credible evidence on complex change processes: key challenges in impact evaluation on agricultural value chains.

Although a growing field of policy intervention, the effectiveness of public-private value chain support is regularly questioned in the policy realm. Partly resulting from stronger pressures on aid money to show its worth, convincing evidence is asked for the effect on poverty alleviation. However, impact evaluations of interventions are challenging: outcome indicators are often multi-dimensional, impact is generated in dynamic and open systems and the external validity of conclusions are often limited, due to contextual particularities. Therefore, there is a strong case for theory-based evaluation where logic models indicate how the intervention is expected to influence the incentives for people’s behaviour. The key assumptions inherent in these casual models can be tested through observation and measurement of specific outcome indicators, using mixed methods in triangulation. The mix of methods will have to anticipate the major threats to validity to the type of evaluative conclusion that the evaluation is expected to generate .Following the work of Shadish, Cook and Campbell (2002), validity threats relate to: 1) statistical conclusion validity; 2) internal validity; 3) construct validity; and, 4) external validity. The authors propose the combined use of data-set observations and causal-process observations in a comparative case-study design, based on critical realist concept of contextmechanism-outcome configurations. The use of a realist method to describe and analyze intervention pilots, facilitates the exchange of experiences between development agencies with evidence-based research. Its defined generalisation domain may prevent uncritical embracement of good practices. Certain value chain upgrading strategies may be viable and effective in a range of situations but are not the panacea, the standard solution, for creating market access; they all involve specific institutional arrangements that ‘fire’ specific mechanisms and incentives that depend on the institutional environment and social capital of stakeholders involved

Partnering for inclusive business in food provisioning

This review aims to unravel how partnering processes relate to processes of inclusion in the context of food provisioning. In food provisioning, inclusion has two key dimensions: the inclusion of (low-income) consumers to increase levels of food security, and the inclusion of smallholder producers to promote inclusive economic growth. This review discusses both dimensions and shows that the tandem of inclusive businesses and partnering processes reconfiguring the terms under which social groups at both sides of the agri-food chain are included is largely uncharted terrain. The paper ends with three promising areas for further research, which require a further integration of different literatures and perspectives

Credible evidence on complex change processes: key challenges in impact evaluation on agricultural value chains.

Although a growing field of policy intervention, the effectiveness of public-private value chain support is regularly questioned in the policy realm. Partly resulting from stronger pressures on aid money to show its worth, convincing evidence is asked for the effect on poverty alleviation. However, impact evaluations of interventions are challenging: outcome indicators are often multi-dimensional, impact is generated in dynamic and open systems and the external validity of conclusions are often limited, due to contextual particularities. Therefore, there is a strong case for theory-based evaluation where logic models indicate how the intervention is expected to influence the incentives for people’s behaviour. The key assumptions inherent in these casual models can be tested through observation and measurement of specific outcome indicators, using mixed methods in triangulation. The mix of methods will have to anticipate the major threats to validity to the type of evaluative conclusion that the evaluation is expected to generate .Following the work of Shadish, Cook and Campbell (2002), validity threats relate to: 1) statistical conclusion validity; 2) internal validity; 3) construct validity; and, 4) external validity. The authors propose the combined use of data-set observations and causal-process observations in a comparative case-study design, based on critical realist concept of contextmechanism-outcome configurations. The use of a realist method to describe and analyze intervention pilots, facilitates the exchange of experiences between development agencies with evidence-based research. Its defined generalisation domain may prevent uncritical embracement of good practices. Certain value chain upgrading strategies may be viable and effective in a range of situations but are not the panacea, the standard solution, for creating market access; they all involve specific institutional arrangements that ‘fire’ specific mechanisms and incentives that depend on the institutional environment and social capital of stakeholders involved

Development Value Chains meet Business Supply Chains

Value chain promotion is considered a key element of private sector development strategies and pro-poor growth. However, (value) chain concepts are rather complex and unclear. This paper unravels the concept of global value chains and studies the diversity of key value chain-related (supply chain, commodity chain, value chain) approaches. To this aim, we reviewed academic literature and donor agencies’ reports, and consulted a limited number of key informants of donor agencies. This paper distinguishes between the strategic management perspective and the development perspective and reviews added values and limitati ons of each approach. The results suggest that practioners use an eclectic approach towards the value chain concept, although the concept originates from clearly distinctive paths and could be susceptible to miscommunication and misuse. The authors avoid misunderstanding by explicitly opting for a public and pro-poor perspective of the concept of the Global Value Chain

Institutions, Partnerships and Institutional Change

One of the goals of the Partnership Resource Centre (PRC) is to execute evidence-based research and further develop a theoretical framework on the linkages between partnerships and value chain development (ECSAD 2009). Within the PRC Trajectory on Global Value Chains, this goal was specifi ed into the explicit objective to improve public knowledge of how partnerships shape or organise the process of inclusion of smallholders and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in (global) value chains, resulting in more local sustainable competitiveness. The global value chains trajectory takes as point of departure the multi tude of institutional constraints that prevent primary producers and SMEs from exploiting local and foreign market opportunities. Apart from adverse climate conditions, limitations in infrastructure, and health and education issues, market-oriented activities are hampered by the lack of an appropriate institutional business environment. Especially the rural poor often have no proper access to, for instance, credit, technology, or land titles, while their market prospects are insecure (Markelova et al 2009; Poulton et al 2006). Value chain partnerships are increasingly considered to be useful vehicles to tackle these limitations, evidenced in the active promotion of particularly bi-partite partnerships between companies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The synergy derived from partnership cooperation can overcome failures resulting from unilateral action by actors confined within one of the societal sectors (Kolk et al 2008). By addressing the institutional business environment, partnerships can play a pivotal role in enhancing the chances for primary producers and SMEs to turn themselves into viable suppliers of local or global value chains (Bitzer et al 2011) in support of sustainable, local economic development