Agricultural cooperatives and the transition to environmentally sustainable food systems

Jos Bijman and Julia Höhler

Chapter 20 in Handbook of Research on Cooperatives and Mutuals, 2023, pp 313-332 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Agriculture is facing major challenges related to climate chance, loss of biodiversity and food security. To mitigate these problems, a societal transition towards more sustainable food systems is needed. Agricultural cooperatives play major roles in this sustainability transition. Using a transition theory framework, the chapter presents a narrative review of literature on what cooperatives do, and what they could do, to make agriculture and the whole food system more environmentally sustainable. Besides current activities in marketing farm products and providing inputs - both highly important for supporting members to apply sustainable farming practices - cooperatives can set up dialogues within the membership to develop a shared sustainability vision, engage in networking with external stakeholders to lobby for favorable institutional conditions, and more generally take up the role of sustainability intermediary.

Keywords: Business and Management; Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781802202618/9781802202618.00031.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:21014_20

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().