Alliances and Sustainability in Agricultural Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

The relevant role of agricultural enterprises in sustainable development processes has been broadly studied; in developed countries these firms are subject to several forces driving them towards an intense, less sustainable, way of growing crops. One answer by small farmers, the most common agricultural organization in Europe, has been to aggregate in order to increase their negotiation power and get access to more efficient production techniques.In this theoretical paper we have focused on sustainable development processes and the strong relationship between their “three pillars”, or circles, and alliances by agricultural firms; we have used the lens of Resource-Based Theory (Barney, 1996) with a Market-Driven Management (Day, 1994) approach to understand how these various classes of alliances succeed, or hinder, each single agricultural enterprise in developing the needed capabilities to create and sustain a competitive advantage without endangering none of the two other perspectives.In order to assess sustainable development potential in alliances involving agricultural enterprises we have later developed an interpretative model that will be applied to several alliances types whose main characteristics will be discussed referring to some examples from Italian agricultural alliances.