Exploring third-party certification programmes in commodity value chains: A temporal myopia perspective

Abstract

Certification programmes have become a widely adopted practice across commodity industries and serve as a mechanism for encouraging sustainable agriculture aimed at improving livelihoods, reducing poverty, and conserving the environment. Certification has also become critical in shaping the value creation and capture potential of producers, manufacturers, and consumers embedded in the value chains of many commodity industries. However, recent years has seen commodity certification programmes struggling to yield the expected benefits for which they were putatively established. Drawing on temporal myopia (TM) as a theoretical lens, this study explores the existential challenges facing the loosely coupled actors in CVCs, that has led to the floundering of these certification programmes. Focusing on the Ghana cocoa industry, the study provides a fine-grained explication of how the differential and competing organizing practices of these actors cumulatively contribute to the near collapse of these certification programmes. Adopting an interpretive approach and an exploratory qualitative research design, data for the empirical inquiry were chiefly collected using semi-structured interviews with cocoa farmers (25), the Ghana Cocoa Board (5), certification organisations (5), cooperatives (7) and produce buying companies (10). This was supplemented with focus group discussions (44), and publicly available documents on certification programmes. The study makes three main findings. First, the study unpacks the state of the art of certification programmes to understand how loosely coupled actors respond to certification practices, emphasizing how the activities of various loosely coupled actors contribute to those structures and procedures, which provides understanding of the organising practices required in certification programmes. Second, it highlights how TM accounts for the floundering of certification programmes in CVCs. Third, it demonstrates how environmental, social, and institutional factors may interact with the certification requirements, rubrics, and standards, to precipitate a range of organising practices that may operate in combination or serially to facilitate (or impede) certification programmes. The contribution of the thesis is also three-fold. First, broadening our understanding of the state of the art to certification in organising, this study extends our understanding of how loosely coupled actors in CVCs frame, make meaning, and respond to certification practices. Second, the study shows how taken for granted everyday organizing practices of the loosely coupled actors could serially combine to precipitate the near collapse of the certification programmes which frequently seek to promote sustainable production and livelihoods. Third, the study offers deeper insights into how temporal myopia serves as a blocking mechanism which induces these loosely coupled actors’, to focus on short term gains within the contingencies of the socio-economic environment in which they operate.