Reconfiguring consumer and producer relationships – a case study of Community Supported Agriculture in the H2020 project SIMRA

Alternative food networks (AFN) have gained importance with an increasing demand for more ecologically and socially sound food production and distribution and are often defined in opposition to ‘conventional’ food systems (Wellner and Theuvsen 2016; Tregear 2011). Thereby, Tregear (2011) uses the attributes ‘conventional’ or ‘mainstream’ for food systems reliant on industrialised methods of food production and processing. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an example for AFN, where community building, reciprocity and education are built around food and agriculture and complement commodity relations (Hinrichs 2000). CSA is a direct partnership between producers and consumers who share the risks, responsibilities and rewards of farming. Over the contracted time, consumers (so-called “harvest-sharers”) pay their share of the harvest up front and receive local, seasonal food; in turn, farmers may benefit from better income security (see e.g. extensive review in Wellner and Theuvsen 2016; CSA Network UK 2015). The principle of CSA has its roots in Europe and Japan and goes back to the 1960s. The term was first used in 1985, when the first documented farm began in the United States of America (Henderson und Van En 2007). In Austria, CSA is still a relatively new practice, the first CSA was founded in 2011 and according to the Austrian Forum for Food Sovereignty (2016) there where around 26 CSA in 2016. Against this background, the CSA HAWARUHOF serves as the Austrian showcase within the European Union's Horizon 2020 project “Social Innovations in Marginalised Rural Areas” (SIMRA). In SIMRA, the emergence, development and impacts of social innovation are being analysed in order to provide an understanding of collective action for social innovation (Secco et al. 2017). According to the SIMRA definition, social innovation is “the reconfiguring of social practices, in response to societal challenges, which seeks to enhance outcomes on societal well-being and necessarily includes the engagement of civil society actors” (Polman et al. 2017). The small scale biodynamic farm HAWARUHOF was re-arranged into a producer-led CSA in 2012. The farmer of HAWARUHOF cultivates a large variety of local and seasonal vegetables and herbs for its 30 members and offers workshops and seminars e.g. on alternative planting methods. Research questions for the analysis of the case study focus on factors affecting the reorganization of HAWARUHOF into a CSA and the effects of HAWARUHOF on the involved producers and consumers. The methodology for the evaluation of the SIMRA case studies is based on the SIMRA evaluation framework consisting of qualitative and quantitative tools for evaluating the case studies and the analysis of policy processes (Secco et al. 2017).
This contribution provides an outline of the case study as part of the SIMRA project. Since data collection will be starting soon, also some first results will be presented.