Sandra Schwindenhammer

Authority Pooling and Regional Organic Agriculture Standard-Setting: Evidence from East Africa

Abstract A key characteristic of global organic agriculture governance through standards is the coexistence of regulatory fragmentation and regional integration. To reduce barriers to organic trade, especially for market participants from developing countries, international and transnational entrepreneurs increasingly promote the setting of organic agriculture standards (OAS) in different world regions, for example, in East Africa, the Pacific, or Asia. Although scholars from different disciplines have done a lot of research on the role of standards in global governance, we still know little about why and how regional standard-setting processes evolve. Applying findings from regime analysis, entrepreneurship, and political authority, the article introduces the concept of authority pooling. It argues that legal, moral, and technical authority sources interact in a blurred functional division of labour between the public and the private sector in standard-setting. The article presents results from a within-case study of the development of the East African Organic Products Standard using the process-tracing method. It detects the underlying causal mechanism by which international and transnational entrepreneurs pooled different authority sources and, thus, significantly influenced political actors in East Africa to set the first regional OAS in the developing world.

Global organic agriculture policy-making through standards as an organizational field: when institutional dynamics meet entrepreneurs

ABSTRACT Scholars of public policy point to standards as a new form of food and agriculture policy-making. The contribution complements this literature applying analytical concepts from International Relations research and organizational theory. Taking into account the increasingly complex and fluid nature of global food politics, the study undertakes a critical re-evaluation of the organizational field approach. Considering the interconnectedness of structure and agency it adds the concepts of entrepreneurship and calibration to the analysis of global organizational fields. The empirical analysis conducts a qualitative historical examination of the construction of the organizational field of organic agriculture policy-making through standards. It traces three phases of institutional development, identifies areas of contestation and distinct paths of institutional change influenced by the interplay of entrepreneurship and the institutional dynamics of structuration, homogenization and calibration.