Laura van Oers and Jacob Smessaert present at SPRU PhD Forum: Collaboration in Context

On 18 June Laura van Oers and Jacob Smessaert presented at the 2021 SPRU PhD Forum: Collaboration in Context: Advancing Research and Policy Practices in Science, Technology, and Innovation.

Laura and Jacob’s presentation focuses on a project that aims to set-up a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS) in the Netherlands – an 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, (iii) allocate new roles and responsibilities to citizens.
Despite the acclaimed potential of PGS to support food system transformation beyond capitalist configurations (Montefrio and Johnson 2019; Anderson et al. 2021), it is still unclear how the unmaking of dominant configurations unfolds in practice (Koretskaya and Feola 2020). To this end, this project explores how PGS unmake ideas around, and practices of participation, legitimation and knowledge production for sustainability.
To better grasp such processes of unmaking for food system transformation, we directly engage with Dutch food communities by collaboratively setting-up a PGS. The 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 as ‘food citizens’. To this end, the CSA network has asked us to co-design and facilitate the process of setting-up a pilot project in which members of food communities (farmers and citizens) collectively develop a PGS that responds to their context and local needs. We envision a 6-month collective trajectory with regular meetings starting in October 2021. Joining in on such endeavours 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 capitalist configurations may be unmade in the process. Together with the food communities, we will explore 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?
• How are alternative methods of collecting and assessing data legitimised?