ISEAL Alliance

Workshop: Commensurable or Not

Exploring the interaction between standard systems and bottom-up biodiversity conservation initiatives

Workshop, Friday January 14 2011, 10:00-16:00 hour

Hof van Wageningen, Lawickse Allee 9, 6701 AN WAGENINGEN, the Netherlands (more info).

The workshop aims to link two distinct features of an integrated strategy for conserving agro-biodiversity. On the one hand, it builds on locally embedded business models, rural livelihood strategies and productive practices sustaining diversity of the natural resource base in a specific territorial domain. On the other hand, it recognises that the viability of such endeavours increasingly depends on the linkages with market developments and value chain integration, in particular through standard setting and certification. The focus is on the interface where these two sometimes opposite dimensions of robust agro-biodiversity conservation strategies come together.

The workshop builds on in-depth investigations of hands-on strategies and interventions of partners in Colombia (bamboo), Ghana (red palm oil), Namibia (Marula nut), South Africa (Rooibos tea) and Thailand (organic rice) (click here for more information). A series of studies documented instructive events and processes, collected anecdotal evidence and tried to explicate the mechanisms at work in these specific situations. In the days preceding the workshop, the project partners will work together in cross-case learning to explore new ways of looking at the institutional constraints and opportunities faced by the Southern partners engaged in linking biodiversity conservation to the dynamics and logics in markets and value chains. These insights will be a major input to the workshop.

During the workshop we would like to engage you in a grounded strategic discussion on how to enhance fitness of locally embedded agro-biodiversity conservation strategies with existing standard systems in domestic and cross-border value chains. We think that the focus of this discussion is of interest to standard systems and development policy for the following reasons:

• Agro-biodiversity has a spatial and territorial dimension, which challenges standard systems to find a way to include in improvement processes different forms of collective action and activities crossing the boundaries of individual production units;
• The scope of agro-biodiversity conservation opens views on institutional set-ups conducive to up scaling of locally embedded development endeavours, which informs standard systems and policy about how to manage dependencies in processes of change;
• The nature of agro-biodiversity conservation strategies, grounded in territorial dynamics and based on various forms of collective action and coordination, makes improvement a contextual, emergent outcome which is difficult to attribute to a single intervention, i.e. standards and certification. This invites standard systems and policy to reconsider linear views on impact evaluation, assuming a high level of control by the interventionist, and to include interdependencies in the evaluation of improvement processes.

With the results of the discussion we aim to inform on-going discussions on impacts and up scaling among members of ISEAL (International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance) and Dutch policy focusing on linking biodiversity conservation and development.

For registration send an e-mail to Inge Ruisch (inge [dot] ruisch [at] wur [dot] nl).
For more information contact Sietze Vellema (sietze [dot] vellema [at] wur [dot] nl).