Re-Thinking Knowledge in Community-Supported Agriculture to Achieve Transformational Change towards Sustainability
Julius Max Meyer () and
Markus Hassler
Additional contact information
Julius Max Meyer: Department of Geography, University of Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Markus Hassler: Department of Geography, University of Marburg, 35032 Marburg, Germany
Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 18, 1-19
Abstract:
Community-supported agriculture has gained a significant amount of prominence in recent years by offering a more sustainable and morally acceptable alternative to conventional food systems. Their organization offers a modern take on how to manage production by supporting the usage and exchange of knowledge between all stakeholders involved. The leverage points concept argues that re-thinking how knowledge is produced and used in systems is one of the key realms of leverage in which transformation towards sustainability can be achieved. Current sustainability research lacks a focus on deep leverage points that bear great potential for transformational change. This concept, however, revolves around these deep realms of leverage and has not been applied to CSA yet. Thus, a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews has been performed at 22 CSA farms in Germany in order to gather detailed insights on the production and flow of knowledge and analyze if and to what degree these CSAs have the potential to leverage transformational change towards sustainability. This analysis helps to understand how certain mechanisms can influence sustainability in a positive manner and promote the usage of these mechanisms in the agricultural landscape. Ultimately, the data indicates that CSAs do bear great potential to leverage sustainability transformation in regard to re-thinking agriculture. Characteristics that lead to this cognition are a highly cooperative, participatory and transparent structure, characteristics that allow for the creation and exchange of information to flourish.
Keywords: sustainable agriculture; knowledge creation and use; leverage points; sustainability transformation; alternative food networks; community-supported agriculture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/18/13388/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/18/13388/ (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:18:p:13388-:d:1234577
Access Statistics for this article
Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu
More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().