Governing sustainability: Knowledge, standards and innovation transitions
Résumé
Social and environmental standards development organizations (SDOs) have been collaborating together within the ISEAL Alliance to construct ‘meta-standards'. These exercises in standards-setting are part of a longer-term process of transitioning innovative approaches to sustainable agriculture from niches into a regime of certified sustainability. Envisioning transitions as multi-level processes (MLP) has been restricted to industrial transitions and ex-post analysis. Temporally, we are situated within this transition where sustainability remains a fluid and contested concept and the knowledge needed for its governance is uncertain. Socio-technical devices (standards) are important to transitions as an essential source of lock-in, yet we see standards mobilized as strategies of intermediaries (SDOs) who stabilize discourse and coordinate actors. We propose participatory methodology as a means to approach sustainability transitions through the strategies of actors, power struggles and forms of governmentality in a more consistent framework that links socio-technical dimensions of standards and socio-political dimensions of knowledge regimes.