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Since the introduction of product certification in the 1980s, fair trade has grown apart from its social justice roots and the focus has steadily shifted away from calls for institutional market reform, corporate accountability, and fair prices, and toward a celebratory embrace of poverty alleviation and income growth through market integration and business partnerships. This paper examines fair trade's narratives of poverty and partnerships, focusing on the brand communication strategies employed by influential fair trade organizations and businesses. These are compared with how fair trade coffee producers in southern Mexico understand and practice partnership, demonstrating some of the ways in which the latter resist narrative framings which position them as entrepreneurial businesspeople first and cooperativistas second. The business partnerships between coffee buyers and producers are highly asymmetrical, and the partnerships that matter most for the Oaxacan coffee farmers are not with global businesses and certifiers, but instead with each other and their producer organizations. These relationships did not originate with fair trade, although, they are, in part, sustained by this system which supports democratically organized producer groups, the sharing of technical and market information, and communal management of the fair trade premium. In contrast to the organizations that certify and market their products, the paper demonstrates how farmers regard their precarious economic circumstances as an issue of social justice to be addressed through increased state support rather than market empowerment. The analytical juxtaposition of farmers' attitudes with fair trade organizational priorities contributes to the expanding literature examining how fair trade policies are experienced on the ground.

Coffee producers typically sell raw coffee beans as the first step in a global value chain. Recently, groups of producers have formed coffee cooperatives that attempt to regain market power by integrating the other steps of the value chain. This study uses matching to estimate the effect of membership in one such cooperative on the household economy of indigenous coffee producers in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. It contributes to the literature by considering new determinants of participation and outcomes of interest. First, social capital at the individual and village level is correlated with cooperative membership more than other demographic factors. Second, cooperative members report an increase in the share of coffee sold and income from coffee sales but not in per-kilo price or total income. These two results reflect particular features of the Chiapas reality and the desires of the indigenous people the cooperative serves. Thus, they reiterate the importance for economic development projects to consider the context of their interventions.

The success enjoyed by some of the alternative agrifood movements has led to a dual process: on the one hand, their mainstreaming and cooptation; while on the other hand, their institutionalization into public regulation and law. This dual process is the result of the influence these movements have had on consumers and politicians and serves to demonstrate the constant exchange between the spheres of public and private regulation, a feature that characterizes the neoliberal model of governance. In turn, this has led to the appearance of new alternative initiatives which may converge with or diverge from founding initiatives when these are the result of divisions within a movement. The question that arises here is obvious: despite these evident achievements, by working within the market and using the tools of neoliberal regulation, have these movements managed to generate the social change they intended from the outset? This chapter will attempt to answer the question by offering a reflection on two of the most widely discussed aspects of this strategy: first, the private and/or public space where these movements develop and the citizen-consumer duality of the actors to whom they appeal; and second, their ability to generate standards, norms, and certification systems, that is, their ability to establish the rules of the game.

Neoliberal political ideologies have been criticised for their blanket prescription of market reform as the solution to almost any social or environmental problem. This chapter thus examines the ability of market-based solutions to deal with the spatial and social diversity that characterises environmental problems in agriculture. In doing so, the chapter draws on case studies of the international fair trade movement and the regionalisation of natural resource management measures in Australia. Both these cases accept the neoliberal view that social and ecological degradation arises from the failure of markets to reflect the full cost of production, and seek, therefore, to achieve social and environmental objectives through the parallel pursuit of economic rationality. In Australia, voluntary planning and educational activities coordinated at a range of scales from the very local to the water catchment, encourage compliance with locally developed management plans and codes of practice that link the expression of private property rights with a ‘duty of care’ to the environment. In the process, landholders are re-defined as prudent and self-reliant businesspeople for whom sustainable resource management is an essential component of financial viability. Fair trade, by contrast, seeks to transfer social and environmental ‘duties of care’ through the entire fair-trade commodity chain. Auditing, certification and the payment of farm-gate price premiums enable Western consumers to become ‘partners’ in the economic and social development of small and marginalised farming communities; guaranteeing that the ‘fair price’ paid for commodities is reflected in the incomes and, importantly, expenditures of the people receiving them. Despite their differences, these cases are allied in their opposition to protectionist trade policies, their commitment to building the viability of farms as productive business units through exposure to ‘the market’, and their appeals to self-responsibility, empowerment and democratisation. And, ultimately, both fail, by themselves, to deal adequately with the spatial and social diversity that underlies agri-environmental processes and problems. Neither approach, it is suggested, should be abandoned. However, complementary processes of fair trade and bioregional planning are required if either are to achieve their maximum impact.

This article examines how smallholders in Oaxaca, Mexico, experienced and responded to the recent coffee rust disaster, asking whether fair trade coffee producer organizations helped smallholders develop coping mechanisms to offset their vulnerability. It demonstrates how Oaxacan coffee producers were especially vulnerable during the recent rust outbreak due to long-term trends including a decline in governmental support for the sector dating back to the 1990s which resulted in a decline in producer incomes and a concomitant rise in the number of aging and poorly managed coffee plots that were more susceptible to coffee rust. The ongoing price volatility within coffee commodity markets and the continued restructuring of the specialty coffee market also increases the uncertainty producers face when determining how to best respond to the rust disaster. The article details the concrete ways in which fair trade coffee producer organizations help bolster the adaptive capacity of their members, while also noting areas for improvement.

This introduction provides an overview of the discourse on alternative agrifood movements (AAMs) to (1) ascertain the degree of convergence and divergence around a common ethos of alterity and (2) context the chapters of the book. AAMs have increased in recent years in response to the growing legitimation crisis of the conventional agrifood system. Some agrifood researchers argue that AAMs represent the vanguard movement of our time, a formidable counter movement to global capitalism. Other authors note a pattern of blunting of the transformative qualities of AAMs due to conventionalization and mainstreaming in the market. The literature on AAMs is organized following a Four Questions in Agrifood Studies (Constance, 2008) framework. The section for each Question ends with a case study to better illustrate the historical dynamics of an AAM. The literature review ends with a summary of the discourse applied to the research question of the book: Are AAMs the vanguard social movement of our time? The last section of this introduction provides a short description of each contributing chapter of the book, which is divided into five sections: Introduction; Theoretical and Conceptual Framings; Food Sovereignty Movements; Alternative Movements in the Global North; and Conclusions.

Fair trade commonly focuses on the figure of the smallholding peasant producer. The effectiveness of this as a strategy lies in the widespread appeal of an economy based upon independent family producers trying to secure livelihoods in impersonal and exploitative global commodity markets. But the attempt by fair trade to personalise economic relationships between coffee producers and consumers diverts attention away from aspects of the political economy of production for the market. This chapter examines a rural Costa Rican coffee economy that has supplied fair trade markets since the 1980s. Documenting differences in landholdings, the range of activities farmers engage in, and the relationship between landowners and landless labourers, women, and migrant harvesters from Nicaragua reveals differentiation and tensions that are obscured in the “smallholder” model invoked by fair trade.

Sales and purchases of socially and environmentally responsible festival clothing are a way for festival attendees to engage in ethical consumption and for event organizers to undertake sustainable procurement. Although there have been a number of studies examining willingness-to-pay (WTP), few of them examine this in a festival setting, and there is a gap in existing research regarding the determination of actual behavior. The goal of this study is therefore to explore participants’ willingness-to-pay for apparel based on more external motivations (visible environmental messages) and then ascertain whether this behavior was actually replicated in a natural field setting. This study first collected surveys from 427 festival-goers in 2015, then used a natural field experiment in 2016 to investigate whether attendees at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Ontario, Canada, would actually be prepared to pay a premium for ethical festival T-shirts over a conventional alternative. The findings reveal that attendees not only showed a willingness-to-pay but they also did actually pay a premium for such T-shirts.

This chapter seeks to understand the emergence of new institutions of business regulation, standard-setting and governance commonly referred to as multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs), and to consider their implications both from the perspective of regulatory effectiveness and sustainable development.

The analysis synthesizes the findings of a review of 20 such initiatives. It draws on a wide body of literatures and conceptual insights to understand the emergence of these new approaches to international business regulation. The assessment of their emergence, performance, and impacts highlights the complex dynamics of regulatory change.

The findings caution against simple generalizations about the positive or negative outcomes of these new forms of collaborative governance. Their somewhat mixed record can be partly explained by the diverse set of interests, preferences, and agendas of the actors involved; variations in institutional learning, capacities, and power relations; as well as how such initiatives are nested in broader institutions and structures. This points to the need, raised in the conclusion, for intellectual pluralism in advancing knowledge of the effectiveness of new regulatory institutions.

The analysis aims to go beyond studies that (i) tend to focus on just one or a few cases; (ii) that ignore the implications of such initiatives for development in the Global South; and (iii) draw on narrow bodies of theory and literature to understand complex issues.

We examine the role of communication in stimulating consumer attitudes and buying behavior regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR).

We review the literature on communicating CSR to consumers through (1) messages constructed and verified by the company (such as product claims and corporate advertising), (2) messages constructed by the company, but verified by a third party (such as disclosures), and (3) messages constructed and verified by a third party (such as independent consumer guides and publicity).

Communication messages constructed and verified by the company can be quite effective in persuading consumers, if they are communicated in a credible way. The latter can, for example, be done by including specific behaviors and/or outcomes in the message. Messages constructed by the firm, but verified by a third party tend to have a higher credibility, but risk containing either too little information or too much. Finally, messages constructed and verified by a third party can be seen as highly credible, but can sometimes be seen as merely PR. In addition, both messages focusing on deontological responsibility (the firm’s motives and behavior), and messages focusing on consequentialist responsibility (the outcomes of the firm’s behavior) seem important to consumers.

The results offer suggestions on how to communicate about CSR to consumers.

The chapter provides the first comprehensive overview of the literature on communication about CSR to consumers.