Omschakelen doe je samen : oriënterend onderzoek naar de rol van samenwerkingsverbanden in de transitie naar duurzame landbouw

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Lauwere, Carolien De Balk-Theuws, L. W. Buck, Adriaan De Smit, Ann Bosma
Copyright Year	2004
Abstract	In Dutch agriculture emphasis is on the transition towards sustainability. This means that farmers and horticulturalists, each on their own way, have to fill in 'their' new means of sustainable agriculture. This is not so easy. Farmers and horticulturalists cannot convert on their own. They have to deal with many different actors — such as sales partners, traders of raw materials, knowledge infrastructure etcetera who can affect the process of converting. The government also plays an essential role. Within the legal framework, she has to create the right conditions for farmers and horticulturalists to fill in their chosen way of sustainable farming. This clarifies that cooperation plays an essential role in the transition towards sustainable agriculture. There are different types of cooperations: 'big' cooperations with a lot of different actors or smaller cooperations with more like-minded actors; cooperations with especially social goals or cooperations which are more directed to the market. They all strive for more sustainability, but do they really contribute to the transition to sustainable agriculture? And what kind of role does the government play? Or what kind of role should she play? These are the central questions in the orientating study of the role of cooperations in the transition towards sustainable agriculture. The study is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality and carried out by researches of Wageningen University and Research Centre. The study was based on a short literature review about transition processes and 22 telephone interviews with representatives of different kind of cooperations (oriented towards society or market and organised top-down or bottom-up). It appeared that all studied cooperations had some characteristics of transition processes. They mostly had clear common goals, common interests or at least linked interests and contributed to more sustainability. The characteristics 'an increasing pressure to change', 'capacity to change present', 'different actors with different interests involved', 'transfer of knowledge occurs' and 'room for learning is present' were lacking quite often in the screened cooperations. The characteristics of transitions processes 'experiments possible' and 'the government plays an equivalent role' were especially lacking in top-down organised cooperations. Goals of social oriented cooperations were more related to people, planet and profit aspects than market oriented cooperations which especially had profit related goals. Social oriented cooperations also contributed more to transition processes by means of transfer of knowledge, increasing awareness about the importance or possibilities of sustainable agriculture and learning processes. Besides this, social oriented cooperations more often involved more different actors with different interests than market oriented cooperations and the govemement more often played an active role in these cooperations. Market oriented cooperations mostly are created by agricultural entrepreneurs. They mostly have profit related goals and can contribute to transition processes because of the strong internal drive of the participants. They often came into being by an internal stimulus and are more often organised bottom-up than social oriented cooperations. The participants are also more like-minded than in social oriented cooperations. The government plays an important role in transition processes. This role must be equivalent with that of the participants but the govemement also must keep the stage-management. This is rather complicated. One of the complaints of the cooperations participating in the research was that cooperations are often hindered by unclear, too strict or contra-productive legislation. The most important task of the government in transition processes is to set a favourable institutional climate.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://edepot.wur.nl/345203
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.ergolabresearch.eu/pdf/ArtTransitieDuurzaam.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article