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This paper addresses the coordination and innovation issues needed for promoting value added at the rural and regional level. There are two sides to value added: the ability to meet consumer demand, and to identify least cost ways of supplying the demanded goods. Human and social capital plays an important role on both sides. At the municipality level the supply side issues are complex. First, because the production space has far more dimensions than for the single entrepreneur. Second, because the value of some goods and services produced depend on what other goods and services those are available. On the supply side networks are important to solve the coordination issues, while networks for identifying and understanding consumer preferences are important on the demand side. Participation in these two network types compete for the same scarce resource, the time of the inhabitants of a municipality. We address these issues in more detail. A major insight from our work is that in addition to the time conflict, innovation and new information may make it more difficult to maintain coordination networks., paper from plenary session

Many previous analyses of multifunctionality in agriculture claim there is positive jointness between the production commodities and nonmarket goods and services. Those analyses have not treated acreage as an endogenous variable. This leads to several errors in terms of the analysis of policy impacts, and hence also the policy advice. The main contribution of this paper is the development of an analytical framework where acreage is endogenously determined. This framework is then used to demonstrate that any policy that influences resource allocation also affects agricultural commodity production. Hence, there is no such thing as a fully decoupled support. The impacts on commodity markets from direct payments to environmental goods and services are, however, smaller than the distortions from policies that inflate commodity prices.