Abstract
Abstract Calls for agri-food system sustainability transitions abound and increasingly draw attention to the need for addressing deeply ingrained social, cultural and economic logics that drive unsustainability, and specifically political economy of the systems of provision. Yet, the analytical conceptualization of diversity with regards to capitalism in agri-food systems remains limited. This paper fills this gap by proposing and illustrating a framework for recognizing capitalist, alternative capitalist, and non-capitalist configurations in enterprises, cooperatives, associations, and other socioeconomic entities in agri-food systems. The framework is informed by poststructuralist theories of capitalism and development, as well as by other analyses and critiques of capitalism rooted in relational understandings of society-in-nature. It entails the following dimensions: (a) ontology: space, time, human nature, logic of relation; (b) economic relations: enterprise, labour, economic transactions, Property, finance; (c) relation with the State: participation in regulation and legitimation; (d) knowledge. The application of the framework to cases of community supported agriculture (CSA) shows the coexistence of capitalist, alternative-capitalist or non-capitalist elements in CSA initiatives. Distinct CSA initiatives show different configurations of the framework's elements. In some cases, configurations changed over time as a result of tensions between actors, or between the CSA and its context. The uncovering of these dynamics proves that the framework can be a valuable tool for recognizing diversity beyond capitalism in a given food initiative.
Highlights
Calls for agri-food system sustainability transitions abound and increasingly draw attention to the need for addressing deeply ingrained social, cultural and economic logics that drive unsustainability, and political economy of the systems of provision
Being informed by a more expansive notion of capitalism, and of diversity, than the ones adopted to date in the literature, the framework proposed in this paper can help identify multiple premises for social struggle and sustainability transitions other than those directly related to capitalist economic relations
We proposed a framework for recognizing diversity beyond capitalism in agri-food systems
Summary
Capitalist industrial agriculture is widely recognized as being so cially and environmentally unsustainable (Buttel, 2006; Weis, 2010; Woodhouse, 2010; IPES FOOD, 2016). The proposed framework helps to reveal different ways in which capitalist, alternative capitalist, and non-capitalist elements can coexist in agri-food systems beyond economic relations, and how doing so may engender tensions in given socioeconomic entities over time. Such illuminations open the floor to a more enriched perspective of sustainability transitions of agri-food systems that rely on more-thancapitalist economies—i.e. economies in which practices based on ethics of care, redistribution, and commoning, among others, can be considered to be at least as valid as organizational forms based on the ethics of accumulation. An exception to the inductive trend is Chiffoleau et al (2019) proposed framework, which builds on new economic sociology, convention theory, and social and solidarity economics principles with the aim of better describing AFN, including development challenges and modalities; it neglects the question of whether and how AFN’s characterizing elements configure in non-capitalist configurations
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