Laura van Oers presents at NEST conference

Laura van Oers presented the paper ‘Setting-up a participatory guarantee system (PGS) with Dutch food communitie’, which is sco-authored by Jacob Smessaert at the 7th conference of the Network of Early Career Researchers in Sustainability Transitions, 5-6 May in Lyon, France.

Abstract

Deliberate sustainability transformation calls for democratic renewal (Stirling 2015; Goetz et al. 2020). Our project aims to collaboratively set up a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS), which presents a more democratic alternative to conventional third-party certification for organic produce. PGS reallocates authority to local communities of farmers and citizens, who collectively define, measure and assess sustainability practices (Loconto and Hatakana 2018). Although a variety of context- and place-specific PGS exist, they essentially (i) challenge traditional knowledge production, distribution and expertise, (ii) re-consider relations between producers and consumers, and (iii) allocate new roles and responsibilities to citizens. However, it is little understood how processes of transformation towards these systems occur in practice (Koretskaya and Feola 2020).

The community-supported agriculture (CSA) network in the Netherlands envisions an important role for PGS to make food communities more autonomous by decoupling from third-party certification, and to empower consumers to take on a more active role and greater responsibility in food system transformations. To this end, active members of the Dutch network have asked us to co-design and facilitate the process of setting up a pilot project in which food communities (farmers and citizens) collectively develop a PGS that responds to their context and local needs. We have launched a 6-month collective trajectory with regular group discussions starting in January 2021. Joining in on such endeavors from the conception phase, not only as ‘participatory-observants’ (Gill and Johnson 2002) but as active process facilitators, enables us to gather rich data on how these food communities question and challenge traditional ways of defining, assessing and measuring sustainability, and particularly how habitual practices and beliefs are unmade in the process.

The collective journey in setting up a PGS will aid us to make observations regarding the following questions: How are roles and responsibilities redistributed? How are new roles and responsibilities legitimised? How is authority reallocated from experts to a multi-stakeholder group and what does this imply? How and to what extent do PGS challenge ‘traditional’ knowledge production and the ‘rule of expertise’? How are new ways of co-producing knowledge performed? How does ‘old’ knowledge compete or co-exist with ‘new’ knowledge?