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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

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