This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonCertification programmes have become a widely adopted practice across commodity
industries and serve as a mechanism for encouraging sustainable agriculture aimed at
improving livelihoods, reducing poverty, and conserving the environment. Certification has
also become critical in shaping the value creation and capture potential of producers,
manufacturers, and consumers embedded in the value chains of many commodity industries.
However, recent years has seen commodity certification programmes struggling to yield the
expected benefits for which they were putatively established. Drawing on temporal myopia
(TM) as a theoretical lens, this study explores the existential challenges facing the loosely
coupled actors in CVCs, that has led to the floundering of these certification programmes.
Focusing on the Ghana cocoa industry, the study provides a fine-grained explication of how
the differential and competing organizing practices of these actors cumulatively contribute to
the near collapse of these certification programmes. Adopting an interpretive approach and
an exploratory qualitative research design, data for the empirical inquiry were chiefly
collected using semi-structured interviews with cocoa farmers (25), the Ghana Cocoa Board
(5), certification organisations (5), cooperatives (7) and produce buying companies (10). This
was supplemented with focus group discussions (44), and publicly available documents on
certification programmes. The study makes three main findings. First, the study unpacks the
state of the art of certification programmes to understand how loosely coupled actors respond
to certification practices, emphasizing how the activities of various loosely coupled actors
contribute to those structures and procedures, which provides understanding of the
organising practices required in certification programmes. Second, it highlights how TM
accounts for the floundering of certification programmes in CVCs. Third, it demonstrates how
environmental, social, and institutional factors may interact with the certification
requirements, rubrics, and standards, to precipitate a range of organising practices that may
operate in combination or serially to facilitate (or impede) certification programmes. The
contribution of the thesis is also three-fold. First, broadening our understanding of the state
of the art to certification in organising, this study extends our understanding of how loosely
coupled actors in CVCs frame, make meaning, and respond to certification practices. Second,
the study shows how taken for granted everyday organizing practices of the loosely coupled
actors could serially combine to precipitate the near collapse of the certification programmes which frequently seek to promote sustainable production and livelihoods. Third, the study
offers deeper insights into how temporal myopia serves as a blocking mechanism which
induces these loosely coupled actors’, to focus on short term gains within the contingencies of
the socio-economic environment in which they operate.Ghana Scholarship Secretaria