Egon Noe

What makes organic agriculture move: protest, meaning or market? A polyocular approach to the dynamics and governance of organic agriculture

Many different actors have hopes and aspirations for the future of organic agriculture. They have different perspectives on organic agriculture with different understandings of what it is and what makes it move. Each perspective entails a certain understanding of organic agriculture featuring certain concepts and values and a particular logic or rationality. We describe three perspectives based on protest, meaning and market. No perspective is the ‘right’ one and, we claim, different perspectives cannot be merged. We therefore suggest a polyocular approach that may facilitate a broader understanding of organic agriculture by enabling us to handle different perspectives, and which may be helpful in various discourses on the future of organic agriculture and how it may be influenced.

Observing the observers: uncovering the role of values in research assessments of organic food systems

Assessing the overall effects of organic food systems is important, but also a challenge because organic food systems cannot be fully assessed from one single research perspective. The aim of our research was to determine the role of values in assessments of organic food systems as a basis for discussing the implications of combining multiple perspectives in overall sustainability assessments of the food system. We explored how values were embedded in five research perspectives: (1) food science, (2) discourse analysis, (3) phenomenology, (4) neoclassical welfare economics, and (5) actor-network theory. Value has various meanings according to different scientific perspectives. A strategy for including and balancing different forms of knowledge in overall assessments of the effects of food systems is needed. Based on the analysis, we recommend four courses of action: (1) elucidate values as a necessary foundation for research assessment across perspectives; (2) openly discuss the choice of perspective, because it is decisive; (3) formulate common goals that can be translated into the different perspectives; and (4) consider assessment of food system sustainability a learning process and design it as such.

Observing farming systems: Insights from social systems theory

In Denmark, agriculture is becoming increasingly specialised, and more and more actors are becoming involved in farm decision making. These trends are more or less pronounced in other European countries as well. We therefore find that to understand modern farming systems, we have to shift the focus of analysis from individual farmers to communication and social relations. This is where Luhmann’s social systems theory can offer new insights. Firstly, it can help observe and understand the operational closure and system logic of a farming system and how this closure is produced and reproduced. Secondly, it provides a theory of functional differentiation and structural couplings that opens up for a new approach to look at sustainability by way of decoupling, recoupling and new forms of coupling.

Opportunities and challenges for multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability

The focus of the Special Feature on “Multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability” is on the complex challenges of making and communicating overall assessments of food systems sustainability based on multiple and varied criteria. Four papers concern the choice and development of appropriate tools for making multicriteria sustainability assessments that handle built-in methodological conflicts and trade-offs between different assessment objectives. They underscore the value of linking diverse methods and tools, or nesting and stepping their deployment, to help build resilience and sustainability. They conclude that there is no one tool, one framework, or one indicator set that is appropriate for the different purposes and contexts of sustainability assessment. The process of creating the assessment framework also emerges as important: if the key stakeholders are not given a responsible and full role in the development of any assessment tool, it is less likely to be fit for their purpose and they are unlikely to take ownership or have confidence in it. Six other papers reflect on more fundamental considerations of how assessments are based in different scientific perspectives and on the role of values, motivation, and trust in relation to assessments in the development of more sustainable food systems. They recommend a radical break with the tradition of conducting multicriteria assessment from one hegemonic perspective to considering multiple perspectives. Collectively the contributions to this Special Feature identify three main challenges for improved multicriteria assessment of food system sustainability: (i) how to balance different types of knowledge to avoid that the most well-known, precise, or easiest to measure dimensions of sustainability gets the most weight; (ii) how to expose the values in assessment tools and choices to allow evaluation of how they relate to the ethical principles of sustainable food systems, to societal goals, and to the interests of different stakeholders; and (iii) how to enable communication in such a way that the assessments can effectively contribute to the development of more sustainable food systems by facilitating a mutual learning process between researchers and stakeholders. The wider question of how to get from assessment to transformation goes across all three challenges. We strongly recommend future research on the strengths, weaknesses, and complementarities of taking a values-based rather than a performance-based approach to promoting the resilience and sustainability of coupled ecological, economic, and social systems for ensuring food security and agroecosystem health in the coming millennium.

Sustainability assessment and complementarity

Sustainability assessments bring together different perspectives that pertain to sustainability to produce overall assessments, and a wealth of approaches and tools have been developed in the past decades. However, two major problems remain. The problem of integration concerns the surplus of possibilities for integration; different tools produce different assessments. The problem of implementation concerns the barrier between assessment and transformation; assessments do not lead to the expected changes in practice. We aim to analyze issues of complementarity in sustainability assessment and transformation as a key to better handling the problems of integration and implementation. Based on a generalization of Niels Bohr’s complementarity from quantum mechanics, we have identified two forms of complementarity in sustainability assessment, observer stance complementarity and value complementarity. Unlike many other problems of sustainability assessment, complementarity is of a fundamental character connected to the very conditions for observation. Therefore, complementarity cannot be overcome methodologically, only handled better or worse. Science is essential to the societal goal of sustainability, but these issues of complementarity impede the constructive role of science in the transition to more sustainable structures and practices in food systems. The agencies of sustainability assessment and transformation need to be acutely aware of the importance of different perspectives and values and the complementarities that may be connected to these differences. An improved understanding of complementarity can help to better recognize and handle issues of complementarity. These deliberations have relevance not only for sustainability assessment, but more generally for transdisciplinary research on wicked problems.

Sustainable agriculture issues explained by differentiation and structural coupling using social systems analysis

In spite of many initiatives to increase sustainability, agriculture moves in the opposite direction with increased pesticide impacts and decreased nature quality. Here, we propose that this issue is not mainly due to lack of agronomic knowledge, but due to the lack of knowledge on social processes of specialization and differentiation. Here, we review the challenge of agriculture and sustainable development based on Niklas Luhmann theory of social systems. We focus on the concepts of differentiation and structural couplings. We use two forms of analysis, discursive differentiation and organizational differentiation, which mutually support each other. First, we analyze discourse categories, named ‘semantics’ in the social systems theory, such as ‘environmental problems’ and ‘food safety’. We then look at how these discourses are related to the discourse of sustainability. Secondly, we describe different forms of organizational differentiation within agriculture and food, e.g., in the pig production chain. Here, we show how sustainability problems can be seen as an unavoidable consequence of the ‘decouplings’ that follow these differentiation and specialization processes. Finally, using the insights from social systems theory, we discuss how these sustainability problems might be mitigated by the following three forms of new structural couplings: (1) functional couplings of organizations to generalized semantic perspectives on e.g., environment and nature, which can reintroduce the sensibility of agri-food systems to their surroundings, (2) structural couplings between organizations that can handle other dimensions than price and quantity, including couplings mediated by labels and network couplings such as partnerships that provide options for co-evolution, and (3) second order couplings to polyocular semantics such as the sustainability semantic; that is, semantics that have their strength and challenge in the fact that they are multiperspectival and must remain indeterminate. Social systems analysis is a novel and strong tool to analyze social differentiation processes in agriculture. Social systems analysis provides researchers, farmers, and companies new ways to understand the sustainability problems that these differentiation processes produce.

Three perspectives on motivation and multicriteria assessment of organic food systems

Organic food systems are based on a complex of value criteria that often are not explicitly considered when agents think, communicate, and make decisions concerning organic food. Multicriteria assessment (MCA) refers to a group of tools that help the user to tackle such highly complex issues. The question is how an MCA tool should be designed to facilitate reflections, communication, and decision making in relation to organic food systems. A key issue is motivation. There are several divergent theories of motivation, and the question cannot be adequately answered by using any single theory. We discuss an economic, a psychosocial, and a relational perspective on motivation and MCA. Using the example of a consumer assessing and choosing products in the supermarket, the economic conception of motivation offers a focus on decision-making processes. The psychosocial approach to motivation draws attention to the influence of cognitive structures and experience-based emotional drivers. Finally, the relational approach stresses that motivation is situated in the relations between agents. We discuss how the three perspectives converge and diverge regarding the purpose of using an MCA tool, the scope of the MCA, the strategic focus, and challenges and potentials associated with an MCA tool. Through this multiple-perspective approach, the general idea of MCA is expanded and elaborated to refine the design of an MCA tool for organic food systems.

Regulation of Agroecosystems: A Social Systems Analysis of Agroecology and Law

There are two main challenges for law and policy to foster a sustainable development of agri-food systems through regulation. The first challenge is that the regulation of a certain aspect often does not lead to the intended outcomes. Regulative measures can only perturb, disturb or irritate agroecosystems because they are self-organising and autopoietic systems. All regulation of autopoietic systems depends on self-regulation because it is the ability of the agroecosystem to observe the disturbance and its internal schema of logic that will define the reaction. The second challenge is that regulation of one aspect often leads to unforeseen and unwanted side effects regarding other aspects. These unintended effects call for more regulations to deal with them, leading to a paradoxical situation of an increasingly growing web of regulation and effects, a situation that is concretely reflected in the exponential growth rate of the amount of positive law on agriculture and environment. These challenges are amplified by the increasing complexity created by specialisations in science, law and farming practice, a complexity that cannot be dealt with by further specialisation. In this chapter, we argue, based on social systems theory, that there is a need for a second-order platform of agroecological regulation where different scientific and law perspectives can meet and communicate about sustainable development and regulation of agroecosystems. But it requires that each perspective acknowledges its own blind spots and acknowledges that the agroecosystem can be seen from many other perspectives.

It’s never too late to join the revolution! – Enabling new modes of production in the contemporary Danish food system

ABSTRACT The Danish food system has undergone a transition in the past 10–20 years, in which new quality conventions have evolved. Examples include increasing organic production and consumption, and increasing interest in local food, experience, community, taste and gastronomy. This article explores what influences if and how these new food trends are expressed in the food system. We conduct a comparative case study involving three product categories: craft beer, specialty flour and organic broilers. Craft beer and specialty flour have undergone a revolution, in which new flavours, products, practices and social relations are generated; by contrast, organic broilers have remained a relatively stable product category. The case studies demonstrate that the revolution is not just taking place in one domain, but it implies a multidimensional reconfiguration of the food system where an emphasis on multiple quality aspects and diversification of the product category is important. However, food trends are not the invention of the individual producer, but serve as common conventions that products can be related to, although their interpretation is not pre-given. In addition, a transition presupposes a shared vision and a coordination of activities among the actors in the food system or the mobilization of new actors who share this vision.

The quality turn in the Danish food scape: new food chains emerging – new territorial impacts?

Abstract Accounts of the ‘quality turn’ in agro-food literature suggest that there is a potential for growth in the market for ‘high-quality’ food, which utilises distinct notions like ‘quality’ and ‘place.’ These food chains are typically described as ‘alternative.’ Alterity might stem from alternative social or physical geographies of such food chains. This study is focused on exploring whether the utilisation of different notions of quality in emerging producer–consumer networks also translates into new patterns of rural development. This paper is based on data on various sub-sectors of Danish food chains on municipality scale for the period 2000–2005. Specifically, this study seeks to identify whether this is the case in the Danish context. First, the analysis considers the economic geography of Danish food chains on national level. Second, a deviant case on a regional level is considered, which runs counter to the trends on national level.