Governance of sustainability transitions: key values and features derived from Belgian initiatives aiming at introducing local products on supermarket shelves

Bui, Sibylle;Da Costa, Ionara;De Schutter, Olivier;Dedeurwaerdere, Tom
(2017) XXVII Congress of the European Society of Rural Sociology — Location: Krakow, Poland (24.July.2017)

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Food retail corporations are powerful actors of the dominant food system, accounting for more than 95% of food market share in Belgium. Driven by motives of profit maximisation, they exert strong lock-in effects that hinder the transition towards a more sustainable food system. Through the criteria they impose on the upstream part of the food chain (e.g. homogeneity standards, volume and uninterrupted supply requirements) and through their marketing practices (e.g. back margins), they exclude a significant part of sustainable food products from their shelves which makes them lowly available for consumers. Recently, several initiatives aiming at enabling the introduction of local, low-input, small farmers’ products on supermarket shelves have emerged in Belgium. These initiatives mainly take the form of logistic platforms, that have been launched by local authorities and/or civil society organisations (CSOs). As supermarkets seek to improve their image, they are becoming a flourishing activity. This raises the following question: is the development of local sourcing in supermarkets an opportunity for a transition towards more sustainable food systems (i.e., for sustainable farming and food practices and for fair marketing practices to be broadly adopted), and if so, under which conditions? In our research, we combine the multi-level perspective with a pragmatist approach to analyse three initiatives, which rely on different governance arrangements and produce different subsystems. In order to assess the impact of these initiatives on the broader food system, we take into account all the actors involved (producers, processors, retail corporations, alternative retailers, public authorities, CSOs, consumers), and for each one of them, we jointly analyse: the key ethical issues and professed values, and their evolution over time; the implementation (or absence) of related practices; and the coordination and governance features they participate in and their evolution over time. Our results show that hybrid governance arrangements which bring together producers, large retailers, CSOs and/or local authorities produce hybrid ethical framings. Depending on the ethical framing, actors are stimulated to adopt or develop more or less sustainable farming, marketing and food practices. Although changes remain marginal for retail companies, we identify key values which can trigger a deep transformation of the food system, and the governance features which allow niche actors to uphold these values, enrol some of the regime actors and thereby favour the development of ethical values within the dominant food system and facilitate the emergence and scaling up of alternative, more sustainable subsystems.
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Bui, S., Da Costa, I., De Schutter, O., & Dedeurwaerdere, T. (2017). Governance of sustainability transitions: key values and features derived from Belgian initiatives aiming at introducing local products on supermarket shelves. XXVII Congress of the European Society of Rural Sociology, Krakow, Poland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/125758