A whole system approach to agency in transitions: Evidence of a combined effect of multiple niches
(2018) 9th International Sustainability Transitions conference — Location: Manchester, UK (12.June.2018)
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- Sustainability transitions receive increasing attention from scholars and the related body of literature has grown exponentially in recent years. However, due to the complexity of the processes involved, mechanisms of niche-regime interaction and consequent system reconfiguration remain a blind spot. This paper aims at contributing to the understanding and characterization of these transition mechanisms, based on the analysis of an on-going transition towards agroecology in a French small region. Agriculture’s transition towards agroecology requires a radical transformation of production practices based on ecological principles, along with radical changes in processing, marketing and consumption practices and in advisory systems, public policies and research. In the Drome Valley, the high proportion of organic farming (30% in 2015 versus 5% at the national level) and the diversity of actors who base their development strategy on organic farming/products suggest that an agroecological transition is in process and that the territorial scale might facilitate it. To explore these hypotheses, I analysed the evolution of the sociotechnical agrifood system at the scale of this territory since the 1970s, when organic farming emerged in the valley, with an inductive and ethnographic approach. I observed 59 situations of interactions between actors to see how rules and practices are built in present time, and conducted 24 comprehensive interviews of various actors of the local agrifood system to obtain their interpretation of past and present events and circumstances. Additionally, 30 interviews conducted by colleagues in the frame of other research works were integrated into the analysis. The ethnographic work was complemented by an extensive archival work. The qualitative analysis of more than 700 documents gave me access to past controversies, elements on past negotiations and conflicts, as well as data on failed initiatives. This allowed me to deconstruct the reinterpretation actors may make in present time and to retrace the processes of sociotechnical evolution as precisely as possible. Based on a framework combining the multi-level perspective and pragmatic sociology, I show that a reconfiguration of the whole local agrifood system is indeed on-going, and that it results from a two-step process. The first step occurred in the 1990’s and consisted in the differentiation of two sociotechnical configurations, which partially integrate the proposal of organic farming, within the regime: one which remains in line with the paradigm of agricultural modernization, one which gathers some actors around a new sociotechnical trajectory and what I refer to as the paradigm of ‘ecological modernization’. In the 2010’s, the second step results from interactions between networks of actors promoting radical innovations (niches) in line with a paradigm of ‘radical ecologization’ and some regime actors engaged in the divergent trajectory. I show that these various niches each act on one component of the sociotechnical system. Impacting the regime simultaneously but not in a coordinated manner, they trigger a regime reconfiguration together. Looking at interessement and enrolment processes, I then show how these niches enter in interaction with the regime and how, with the creation of new forms of coordination, niche actors succeed in changing the balance of power within the local agri-food system. Therefore, transitions are no longer a matter of niche scaling-up or niche accumulation. The challenge is to create the conditions to stimulate the coexistence of a diversity of initiatives that develop social innovations and to foster their interactions with the dominant system. Lastly, the territorial scale allowed local actors overcoming the lock-in effects which predominate at the national and global scales, offering them some levers which do not exist at these scales. This advocates for a agroecological transition which is variegated, consisting of multiple locally embedded food systems.
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Bui, S. (2018). A whole system approach to agency in transitions: Evidence of a combined effect of multiple niches. 9th International Sustainability Transitions conference, Manchester, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/125743