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Many development organizations aim for greater incorporation of farmers into the market; however, global value chain scholars warn that farmers may be adversely incorporated and advise to analyse the terms by which farmers are incorporated. This paper sheds light on the dynamics of value chains by showing how the terms by which farmers are incorporated into the market vary significantly depending on the type of farmer and market. To generate benefits for small farmers’ livelihoods, we urge practitioners to consider the workings of multiple marketing channels and the ways in which farmers of different social classes interact with them.

Evaluation in complex programs assembling multiple actors and combining various interventions faces contradictory requirements. In this article, we take a management perspective to show how to recognize and accommodate these contradictory elements as paradoxes. Through reflective practice we identify five paradoxes, each consisting of two contradicting logics: the paradox of purpose—between accountability and learning; the paradox of position—between autonomy and involvement; the paradox of permeability—between openness and closedness; the paradox of method—between rigor and flexibility; and the paradox of acceptance—between credibility and feasibility. We infer the paradoxes from our work in monitoring and evaluation and action research embedded in 2SCALE, a program working on inclusive agribusiness and food security in a complex environment. The intractable nature of paradoxes means they cannot be permanently resolved. Making productive use of paradoxes most likely raises new contradictions, which merit a continuous acknowledging and accommodating for well-functioning monitoring and evaluation systems.

Small and medium size business enterprises (SMEs) are the linchpin in systems of food provisioning in sub-Saharan Africa. These businesses occupy the middle of the agri-food chain and face a food security conundrum: they must ensure that smallholder producers of limited means can operate under fair terms while low-income consumers are supplied with affordable and nutritious food. This task becomes even more challenging when resources are scarce. This paper explores how resource-constrained SMEs arrange the terms on which both farmers and consumers are included in agri-food chains. To this end, it combines the concept of inclusion with that of frugality. We use the case of a Kenyan SME to demonstrate how a focus on frugality can advance our understanding of how business practices create thriving business relationships with smallholders while simultaneously ensuring access to affordable food for consumers. We additionally identify what conditions for inclusion emerge from this type of dynamic business practices. Our perspective departs from assessing induced organisational interventions, such as contract farming or cooperatives, which deliberately shorten the agri-food chain, thereby overlooking the skilful practices being employed by business actors in the middle of the chain.

Evaluation in complex programs assembling multiple actors and combining various interventions faces contradictory requirements. In this article, we take a management perspective to show how to recognize and accommodate these contradictory elements as paradoxes. Through reflective practice we identify five paradoxes, each consisting of two contradicting logics: the paradox of purpose—between accountability and learning; the paradox of position—between autonomy and involvement; the paradox of permeability—between openness and closedness; the paradox of method—between rigor and flexibility; and the paradox of acceptance—between credibility and feasibility. We infer the paradoxes from our work in monitoring and evaluation and action research embedded in 2SCALE, a program working on inclusive agribusiness and food security in a complex environment. The intractable nature of paradoxes means they cannot be permanently resolved. Making productive use of paradoxes most likely raises new contradictions, which merit a continuous acknowledging and accommodating for well-functioning monitoring and evaluation systems.

Small and medium size business enterprises (SMEs) are the linchpin in systems of food provisioning in sub-Saharan Africa. These businesses occupy the middle of the agri-food chain and face a food security conundrum: they must ensure that smallholder producers of limited means can operate under fair terms while low-income consumers are supplied with affordable and nutritious food. This task becomes even more challenging when resources are scarce. This paper explores how resource-constrained SMEs arrange the terms on which both farmers and consumers are included in agri-food chains. To this end, it combines the concept of inclusion with that of frugality. We use the case of a Kenyan SME to demonstrate how a focus on frugality can advance our understanding of how business practices create thriving business relationships with smallholders while simultaneously ensuring access to affordable food for consumers. We additionally identify what conditions for inclusion emerge from this type of dynamic business practices. Our perspective departs from assessing induced organisational interventions, such as contract farming or cooperatives, which deliberately shorten the agri-food chain, thereby overlooking the skilful practices being employed by business actors in the middle of the chain.

The triangle of dairy intensification, commercialisation and market formalisation is promoted to address the challenges of food and nutrition security (FNS) and climate change. This article questions the need for formalisation to reach intensification and commercialisation objectives in Kenya. Moving beyond the binary perception of milk markets as either ‘formal’ or ‘informal’, we investigate a repertoire of milk-collection practices and address the following question: ‘What enables diverse intermediary practices to ensure a consistent flow of milk from grass to glass?’ Sampling, data collection and analysis were guided by a qualitative research design for an empirical exploration of the practices of owner-operated (N = 13) and corporate (N = 4) milk collectors. Iterative analysis of observations revealed three main themes constituting milk-collection practices: (1) buying milk, (2) managing milk (quantity and quality measurement) and (3) selling milk to the next buyer. These practices were enabled and sustained by the diverse options available for each aspect of milk collection, and by the capacity of collectors to accommodate variety in their practices. We invite scholars and practitioners to conduct deeper explorations of how to accommodate events in practice to enhance the success of ambitions relating to FNS and climate change through pathways of intensification and commercialisation.

The method is an integration between practice oriented study and institutional grammar tool that is useful to elicit rules underlying farmer-led collective trading that are usualy unwritten. The article is equipped with steps to elicit unwritten rules and with examples of actual smallholders' collective trading. The integrated method is relevant for researchers or development interventionists in revealing institutional nature of food markets that operate unwritten rules-in-use or a blend of written and unwritten rules-in-use. The data used for analysis this paper is stored in Wageningen University. Due to the sensitivity of the data, the data is not made available for public.

Organising smallholder farmers into groups or co-operatives is widely promoted as a strategy to connect farmers to markets and turn them into price makers rather than price takers. This pathway usually combines co-operative organisational models, based on collective ownership and representation in internal governance, with measures to shorten the agri-food chain, shifting the ownership of intermediary sourcing, aggregating and trading functions to the group. The underlying assumption is that this improves smallholder farmers' terms of inclusion in markets. To scrutinise this assumption, our study compares two examples of farmer-led auctions facilitating trading in the chilli market in Java, Indonesia. The auctions' ownership, management and performance evolved differently: one was run by a group and the other by a family. The comparison brings nuance to the prevalent emphasis on co-operative ownership structures. By researching practices central to collective trading at the chilli supplier–trader interface, this study unravels four dimensions—ownership, voice, reward and risk—capturing smallholder chilli farmers' terms of inclusion in both the auctions and the market. Our comparative analysis suggests that shared ownership and control of the trading function, a central feature of co-operative models, does not necessarily ensure favourable terms of inclusion for smallholder farmers with little capacity to take risks. The capacity to reconfigure the terms of market inclusion for vulnerable smallholder farmers involves direct payment modalities and risk taking. A collectively owned trading organisation does not necessarily imply an inclusive business concept when the organisation cannot acquire sufficient working capital to pay its suppliers.

Pressure from the public and non-governmental organisations is pushing lead companies in the cocoa and chocolate sectors towards becoming more environmentally sustainable and socially just. Because of this, several sustainability programmes, certification schemes and delivery initiatives have been introduced. These have changed the relationship between chocolate companies, cocoa exporters, and small-scale farmers. This paper observes how large companies in the cocoa export and consumer markets are shifting away from their traditionally remote position in the cocoa sector. The pressure to ensure sustainability and justice has provoked more mutually dependent relationships with cocoa producers. Our analysis outlines the implications this emerging reconfiguration of global-local relationships has for procedural justice principles of interdependence and refutability, and the distributive justice principles of need and equity. These principles are important because they enable the different dimensions of inclusion: ownership, voice, risk, and reward. This paper highlights and qualifies arrangements surrounding these justice principles that manifest in the way five service delivery initiatives - associated with sustainability programmes and led by major buying companies in Ghana’s cocoa sector – are implemented. We show inclusiveness as an outcome of dynamic global-local relationships that are constantly reworked in response to smallholder farmers’ agency and state regulations. Portraying inclusiveness as an outcome of interactions changes its conceptualisation from a predefined ethical standpoint included in the design of standards to a result of unfolding mutual dependencies, which refashion how inclusive agriculture value chains work.

Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) are central to sustainability standards and certification programmes in the global cocoa chain. Pruning is one of the practices promoted in extension services associated with these sustainability efforts. Yet concerns exist about the low adoption rate of these GAPs by smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana. A common approach to addressing this challenge is based on creating enabling conditions and offering appropriate incentives. We use the concepts of inscription and affordance to trace the vertically coordinated travel of recommended pruning from research to extension and farming sites, and to describe how pruning is carried out differently at each site. Our analysis suggests that enactments of pruning at the extension site reduce the number of options and space for interactions, and this constrains making the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. The conventions guiding and legitimising actions at this site, reinforced by sustainability standards, certification schemes and associated inspections and audits, favour standardised recommendations and consequently narrow room for context-specific diagnostics and adaptions. Therefore, we reframe the adoption problem as a matter of fit between different sites in the ‘agricultural research value chain’ embedded in the operational cocoa chain. Our contribution problematises the dominant framing of low adoption and highlights that the movement of pruning and the sequential enactment at different sites constrain the affordances available for rendering the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. Consequently, addressing the low uptake of GAPs requires institutional work towards conventions that can construct a fit between sites along the agricultural research value chain.

The private sector has become an important partner in development interventions that aim to make market systems more favourable for smallholders and low-income consumers of food. How to evaluate these inclusive business programmes is the central theme of this IDS Bulletin. It presents real-world experiences of practitioners and academics using theory-based evaluation. This introductory article highlights the approaches and methods used to assess systemic change and provide learning for adaptive management. It acknowledges the limits to attributing outcomes to programmes alone and proposes a way to generalise about effectiveness where outcomes are highly contingent on a specific contextual embedding. The article explores the synergy of the iterative reflections on the theory of change, the analytical approach of realist evaluation, and the conceptualisation of changes in firms’ practices as emerging from behaviour systems where the motivations, opportunities, and capabilities of firms are not equally distributed.

Evaluations of private sector development programmes look at what changed to the workings of the system, and whether these changes are scalable, resilient, and sustainable. We present an evaluation lens that primarily qualifies changes to the systemic nature of food provisioning in markets. It converts theoretical frameworks into ‘antennae’ receptive to early signs of systemic effects of inclusive agribusiness that fosters food and nutrition security. The tools for this theory-informed approach were developed and applied in 2SCALE, a Dutch-funded programme aiming to incubate inclusive agribusiness and contribute to food and nutrition security goals in Africa. The article reflects on what to monitor to detect early signs of systemic effects and how monitoring can be embedded in unfolding business and partnering processes. It concludes that taking a theory-informed approach gives directionality to strategising and planning, and enhances capacities of partners in inclusive business projects to lead actions towards realising systemic effects.

The premise of this chapter is that a focus on practices and their relationships opens a methodological space to investigate how a variety of actors or small groups make knowledge work. The chapter contextualises the methodological discussion in global commodity chains and local food markets, which feature a layered organisational set-up and spatially distributed tasks. It offers a methodological perspective which emphasises: (1) the use of knowledge to make situated practices work; (2) underlying processes of coordination emerging from mutually constituting practices distributed in space; (3) the processes configuring externally-induced and knowledge-based interventions with situated practices. This chapter combines literature at the interface between organisation studies, technology studies, and learning studies, using a practice lens to study knowledge as an accomplishment and an essentially social activity. Two case studies substantiate this methodological perspective: pruning in the global commodity chain of cocoa in Ghana; and the practice of aggregating volumes in local food markets for oilseed and edible oil in Uganda. The focus on knowing as emerging from situated practice is appreciative of local problem-solving capacities, and contributes to detecting and opening spaces for inserting these capacities in the specialised knowing generated in mainstream science and technology institutes.

This Research Topic contains a selection of papers dealing with Fusarium wilt of banana (FWB), also known as Panama disease, that investigate (i) the epidemiology, distribution, infection biology, and diversity of the pathogen, (ii) management practices, and (iii) ways to identify and screen for resistance. The Research Topic arose from the increasing spread and the growing global impact of FWB, affecting a wide range of banana production systems worldwide.During the inception of this Research Topic an increased understanding of genetic diversity of Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. cubense (Foc), traditionally considered as the causal agent of FWB, emerged and showed that Foc comprises several different Fusarium species (Ploetz, 2006; Maryani et al., 2019). The so-called Tropical Race 4 (TR4) was found to be genetically distant from other FWB causing species and was described as Fusarium odoratissimum (Maryani et al., 2019).

The Royal Netherlands Society for Agricultural Sciences (Koninklijke Landbouwkundige Vereniging, KLV, founded in 1886) took the initiative to publish the Netherlands Journal of Agricultural Science (NJAS) in 1953. In 2002, NJAS broadened its scope and was titled: NJAS–Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences. After 134 years, the general assembly of members decided to dissolve the Society in 2020. The end of the Society will not be the end of its journal. This paper presents a brief history of the Society and the journal, which exposes how the Society’s journal, originally strongly anchored in the plant sciences and agronomic research in the Netherlands, evolved towards an international journal with an increasingly strong interdisciplinary scope. The brief history signifies the crucial role of special issues as a collaborative endeavour and learning environment for making interdisciplinary approaches work.

Context: This article focuses on partnerships working on inclusive development and food security in agri-food chains and agribusiness clusters that may feature institutional arrangements reinforcing inequality or inducing exclusion. Research question: The article develops a theory-driven capacity framework for investigating how intervention strategies related to partnering generate developmental outcomes. Methods: Building on action–research and drawing on complementary literature streams, the framework distinguishes four specific capacities that individually and in configuration contribute to processes of inclusive development triggered by partnering processes. The framework is applied to two case examples targeting inclusive development in agri-food chains and agribusiness clusters in domestic food markets in Benin and Nigeria. Results: Four capacities that enable partnerships to contribute to inclusive development are distinguished: deliberative, alignment, transformative and fitting capacity. Processes of inclusive development emerge from mobilizing and combining these complementary capacities. Capacities emerging in evolving joint actions, negotiations and deliberations in partnering processes generate developmental outcomes, which are not self-evident results of partnerships. Presence of the four capacities propels the partnership’s influence on transforming the terms of inclusion for specific groups. Policy implications: The differentiation of specific capacities embedded in partnering processes contrasts with generic partnership formulas focusing on the formalized and organizational features of partnerships and emphasizing sharing of resources and inputs. For partnerships to make a development impact, new capacities need to be developed and mobilized. This underscores the importance of skilful and experienced facilitators.

A diverse ensemble of intermediary traders jointly shape access to food. The food cluster is recognized internally and externally as an institution for trade. A practice-oriented approach demonstrates how institutions are self-reinforced. Assembling a variety of practices is a condition for consolidating the cluster. An institutionally viable food cluster enables access to food in rural settings.

An integrative management approach to the spread and emergence of global plant diseases, such as the soil-borne fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 (Foc TR4), entails a combination of technical measures and the responsiveness and awareness of area-specific constellations supporting conditions conducive to interactions and coordination among organizations and actors with different resources and diverse interests. Responses to banana diseases are mostly studied through technical and epidemiological lenses and reflect a bias to the export industry. Some authors, however, indicate that cross-sector collaboration is crucial in responding to a disease outbreak. Earlier studies on the outbreak of diseases and natural disasters suggest that shared cognition and effective partnerships increased the success rate of response. Hence, it is important not to focus exclusively on the impacts of a pathogen at farm or field level and to shift attention to how tasks and knowledge are coordinated and shared. This paper aims to detect whether and how the emergence of Foc TR4 is a driver of coordination. The case study focuses on the interactions between a variety of banana producers and among a range of public and private actors in southern Philippines. The analysis identifies distinct forms of coordination emerging in the context of three organizational fields responding to Foc TR4, which underlie shared capacity to handle and understand the spread of a global plant disease. The research is based on qualitative key informant interviews and document analysis and on observations of instructive events in 2014–2017. Analysis of the composition and actions developed in three organizational fields leads to distinguishing three theory-driven forms of coordination: rule-based, cognition-based, and skill-based. The combination of these three forms constitutes the possibility of a collaborative community, which conditions the implementation of an integrative management appr

This review aims to unravel how partnering processes relate to processes of inclusion in the context of food provisioning. In food provisioning, inclusion has two key dimensions: the inclusion of (low-income) consumers to increase levels of food security, and the inclusion of smallholder producers to promote inclusive economic growth. This review discusses both dimensions and shows that the tandem of inclusive businesses and partnering processes reconfiguring the terms under which social groups at both sides of the agri-food chain are included is largely uncharted terrain. The paper ends with three promising areas for further research, which require a further integration of different literatures and perspectives.

System archetypes represent generic behavioural patterns – or system dynamics – in any system. The concept of archetypes is mostly applied in the context of business management and organizational life. The term archetype was first coined by Peter Senge (1990) in his seminal book ‘The Fifth Discipline’. He uses systems thinking to convert companies into learning organizations; understanding complexity and reflective conservation are some of the key competences required to address complex problems. But similar archetypes of system behaviour can be found in food systems. The use of archetypes assumes that, if the underlying systemic structure that results in specific behavioural patterns is understood, action can be taken to change the structure and thus systemic behaviour and consequently outcomes. Archetypes capture the ‘common stories’ in systems thinking; that is, dynamic phenomena that occur in diverse settings. The archetypes are used as templates for diagnosing complex problems (Kim, 2000). Below, eight archetypes are explained based on the work of Kim (2000). Based on our own expertise and the information collected during a stakeholder workshop with food systems and FNS experts, we have provided examples of these archetypes in food systems. For each archetype, a set of leverage points is identified, which can offer solutions for the problematic behaviour captured by the archetype (Nguyen and Bosch, 2013).

Securing access to affordable and nutritious food is an urgent topic on the agenda for development strategies in Africa. Intervention strategies targeting food security triggered a long lasting debate whether science and technology driven interventions could be the panacea for hunger eradication. However, contextual factors are extremely important in determining food security, as it is a location specific outcome of how biophysical, geographical, societal and political factors combine. Recent studies emphasize the important role of institutions to understand the persistence of food insecurity or to explain how different actors address food security. This article introduces a special issue that investigates approaches and methods, anchored in different institutionalisms, diagnosing how institutions influence food security levels in diverse African contexts. We draw two main lessons from this special issue. Firstly, there is a clear need for localized ex-ante institutional diagnostics to understand developments in food security in Africa. This can inform and guide decision-makers in designing locally appropriate interventions. Secondly, developing institutional diagnostics in view of sustainable food security requires theoretical triangulation; food insecurity is typically a problem emerging from a configuration of distinct processes. To develop a contextual and precise understanding of how institutions work and to identify what an institutional context 'is good at', the special issue argues in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in the social sciences that is strongly rooted in evolving practices (re)arranging institutions affecting food security.

The increased use of sustainability standards in the international trade in cocoa challenges companies to find effective modes of service delivery to large numbers of small-scale farmers. A case study of the Sustainable Tree Crops Program targeting the small-scale cocoa producers in Côte d’Ivoire supplying international commodity markets shifts attention from mechanisms of private governance to the embedding of service delivery in the institutional dynamics of the state. It demonstrates that, despite a recent history of violent conflict and civil unrest, the introduced Farmer Field Schools programme achieved a surprising scale in terms of numbers and geographical spread. The analysis of this outcome combines political science and anthropological studies of effective and developmental elements in the state with the interest in institutional work found in organization science. The scaling of a new form of service delivery is explained by the skilful practices of institutional work by managers of a public–private partnership. They have been professionally associated with the sector for a long time and had the capacity to embed new forms of service delivery in persistent pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness in a failed state.

Causal explanations of change after an Innovation Platform intervention in a given domain tend to attribute outcomes mainly to what the Innovation Platform did. This paper uses the case study of an Innovation Platform in the value chain of shea nut in Mali, to explore the actual processes that explain why and how innovation platforms lead to desired development outcomes. The articulation of innovation platform activities with the performance of a women's cooperative involved in sourcing shea kernels, and processing and trading shea butter, contributed to enlarging the space for women to navigate opportunities in the shea value chain. The paper emphasizes the underlying processes activated by the articulation between the Innovation Platform's activities and the already existing performance practices in a changing context. It confronts the explanatory power of these processes with assumptions that tend to attribute development outcomes only to what the Innovation Platform did, to unravel the potential and the limitation of Innovation Platforms in the innovation process.

Place branding strategies linking marketing to places have received increasing attention in practice and theory in the past two decades. It is generally assumed that place branding contributes to the economic, social, political and cultural development of cities, regions and countries. But there exists neither a commonly accepted definition nor a sound theoretical framework for place branding research. Studies have until now mainly focused on nations and cities, while the regional scale has rather been neglected, even more in the context of Mediterranean countries. In addition, little is yet known about the conditions, processes, and outcomes of place branding. The objective of this thesis is to contribute to the clarification of the place branding concept and to a broader understanding of this rich and complex phenomenon. The focus is on the underlying conditions, processes and dynamics of place branding in regions that contributes to territorial development. Place branding is related to local food products and tourism for sustainable territorial development in Mediterranean rural regions (in France and Morocco). The introduction chapter outlines the societal and theoretical context of place branding regarding this thesis. Place brands have emerged as attempts to respond to intertwined and multifaceted economic, political and socio-cultural challenges: to the externalities of globalisation, to local development challenges due to regionalisation and decentralisation processes, and to socio-economic tensions in the Mediterranean basin and its food domain. Accordingly, three established literature streams are mobilized: the marketing and branding of places, regional studies and sociology. It is supposed that insights from the three disciplines are needed to understand the conditions, processes and development outcomes of regional branding. This leads to three units of analysis: the first deals with place branding in a narrow sense, understanding it as marketing strate

The past two decades saw a rapid proliferation of sustainability standards created by multi-stakeholder partnerships of multinationals and international NGOs. This paper argues that the transformative capacity of these global partnerships to bring about sustainable change largely depends on how well the institutional features of global sustainability standards fit local organizational fields. This paper therefore aims to unravel the dynamics of global-local interactions. To this end, the concept of institutional fit is operationalized to assess whether and how the technical, cultural and political characteristics intrinsic to global sustainability standards are able to connect to local projects, strategies and practices. The introduction of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council's standard into the Indonesian shrimp sector is used as a case to investigate these interactions. This paper shows that a process of fitting occurs when provisional institutions generated within a global partnership can be modified. We argue that global sustainability standards can benefit from steering more explicitly on dovetailing regulative and normative structures of global and local organizational fields. Local NGOs can play important mediating roles in this regard, which can potentially increase the transformative capacity of global standards in terms of generating and accelerating sustainable change.

In Kenya, bananas and Irish potatoes are important staple crops. In the early 1990s, the crops were devastated by plant diseases resulting in immensely declined productivity and vulnerability of smallholder farmers. To address this problem, disease resistant varieties and tissue culture technology were introduced through partnerships. This thesis examines the working of these partnerships in the process of selecting, multiplying and disseminating improved planting materials under changeable and sometimes unanticipated social and material conditions, and whether this enabled technical change. The study describes how partnerships shape and manage technical change and how distributed task groups coordinate their actions. Partnerships organise and set in motion an evolving chain of sequential socio-technical practices, which incrementally generate technical change. Hence, partnerships are more than just an organisational tool for resource augmentation. Making partnerships work requires constant handling of the politics of selection procedures, the unanticipated consequences of material and technical problems, and the governance and control dimensions of team and group work. The study highlights the often hidden processes coordinating distributed skills and competences and the micro-politics of selection and performance as core elements for making partnerships work. The technographic approach made this visible in the performance of research teams, laboratories and collectively managed nurseries of multiplication sites. The study concludes that partnerships, as an organisational fix, are not a panacea for complicated problems, and a more thorough debate about the conditions under which partnerships may work – and for whom – is needed.

Summary Palm oil is an important product in local diets and domestic markets in the South. The current attention for market quality standards and certification schemes in the palm oil sector has the risk to marginalise the role of palm oil in local food security and to direct public and private investments exclusively to industrial and export-oriented production systems. The rise of a variety of standards in the oil palm sector in recent times particularly the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has impacted on agricultural practices and the social and ecological environments of oil palm production worldwide. In this way, standards shape the way food provision is governed, with a consequence for how to organise production. This thesis was motivated by the dominance of a technological trajectory organised around hybrid oil palm varieties, the strong focus on standards as instruments for sustainable development, and the formation and inclusion of organised farmers in the Ghanaian oil palm sector. The widespread use of red palm oil in local diets, processed from Dura oil palm fruits, and the employment and income opportunities for grouped women are less present in policy documents and scholarly literature. Oil palm sector policy in Ghana is largely biased towards the use of the high yielding hybrid planting materials and industrial processing. This raises a question how small-scale processors are able to make quality red palm oil, which utilises the unique traits of Dura? Starting point for this thesis is the array of opportunities for employment and income generation, especially for small-scale processors in Ghana, grounded in the making of oil with specific quality traits from a specific oil palm (elaeis guineensis). The original assumption of the research was to explore whether a niche market for the specific traits of red palm oil, particularly in the diaspora, would offer new opportunities to combine sustainable livelihoods for women and the conservation of

Ethiopia has become the second largest flower producer and exporter in Africa, next to Kenya. EU markets are the country’s major export destinations, which are demanding in terms of product quality, sustainability of production, and corporate social responsibility. The Ethiopian Horticulture Producers Exporters Association (EHPEA) introduced a code of practice to facilitate compliance with international standards such as Global GAP. Exporters and flower farms, and public policy in Ethiopia supporting the code of practice try to find ways to involve (foreign) experts and university graduates, and to import hardware, such as equipment and crop varieties, in order to be able to perform in the global market. In a newly emerging sector, requirements in international markets and new forms of governance impact on the way problems are solved and production is managed in the greenhouses. The research is motivated by the observation that floriculture in Ethiopia resembles a knowledge-intensive industry and is confronted with increasing demands in the international market to comply with standards for environmentally benign production and corporate social responsibility. Yet, the thesis is critical about the default mechanism to revert to training of individuals. It aims to develop a grounded understanding of how capabilities are formed or emerge in the daily practices and interactions of people and teams within firms operating in the context of less developed regions. The thesis seeks to explore how the practices stipulated in the code of practice are enacted in the everyday realities of workers, technicians, and managers in the floriculture sector. The research investigates these practices by focusing on: (1) a complicated agronomic problem, namely pest and disease management (Chapter 2 and 3), (2) the functioning of university graduates employed by flower farms (Chapter 4), and (3) the relationship between flower farms and the surrounding community relations in the context o

Shea butter extracted from kernels can be found in cosmetic and food products. Organising women to make butter for international markets has been central to development strategies in the Malian shea sector. However, only a limited number of women are actually member of and benefit from such groups. Detailed study of cooperatives revealed that non-members played an important role, and a case study cooperative showed how their interests were accommodated by becoming less dependent on a single, international market and by re-arranging its linkages with traders. Hence, rather than pushing women into a pre-defined practice, the making of butter, this thesis shows the relevance of understanding how women with different social positions engage in the performance of collective tasks in fields and markets. I conclude that co-operation emerges in evolving practices rather than from formal organisational models.

Keywords:small-scale rice farmers, collective action, community rice seed, local innovations, green manure crop, contract farming, participatory technology development, up-scaling, technological configuration, grid-group theory,Northern ThailandMany small-scale rice farmers practise collective action to overcome production constraints, and to generate and redistribute benefits for maintaining improved household livelihoods. The practice is particularly important for small-scale rice farmers inNorthern Thailandwhere rice-based livelihood diversification prevails.The thesis seeks to build an understanding of farmer capacity in cooperation, as well as to identify crucial enabling factors that stimulate collective action to enhance continued learning and adaptation for sustainable development, via analysis of group attributes in relation to four sets of elements: agro-ecological conditions, socio-economic variables, cultural context and the role of government intervention. The study focuses on small-scale rice farming inNorthern Thailand, with the aim to understand the social and technical relations involved in rice based farming systems, and to illuminate scope for participatory technology development more generally.This thesis targets rice farmers because of their important contribution to the country's food security and social economic development.The research was carried out during 2003-2005 ina village with viable forms of collective action (Dong Palan, DPL) and in another village (Buak Mue, BM), included for comparative purposes, where off-farm employment affects labour use and household composition in such a way that collective action eroded or has a different orientation.Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for data collection. Semi-structured interviews of key informants, group meetings, focus group discussion, farmer workshops and participant observation were all employed.The collective action was explored under four case studies including (i) c