Local Creation of Values Through Wine Production: A Swiss Case

The Swiss wine sector has been subject to profound transformations in the past thirty years: overproduction crisis in the 1980’s, introduction of geographical indications (GI) policy at the beginning of the 1990’s and complete liberalization of the wine market in 2000. By the same time, wine consumption dropped, putting national wine producers under increased pressure (mostly from New World wines). These changes generate new dynamics at the local level, where actors organize around the multiple benefits drawn from wine production, showing complex modes of local arrangements to complete or, in some cases, bypass existing regulation (mostly GI and competition policy). Indeed, wine production not only yields income, but also sensitive (taste) and symbolic (identity) forms of value, which local actors strive to secure. Developing a resource perspective (Ostrom, 1990), the aim of this contribution is twofold. First, at the conceptual level, I will expose how the proposed neo-institutional resource framework enables to address simultaneously different key issues of the agro-food sector within a GI system (Bowen, 2010) and its operationalization: values are analyzed as services - for which actors compete - drawn from the resource, while the concept of local regulatory arrangement grasps actors reaction to economic and policy changes in an institutional view. Then, at the empirical level, the case study of a Swiss wine producing municipality will show the interplay in the construction and exploitation of the resource between local actors, new competitors and different scales of regulation. This original analysis of food policy “in use” will reveal and underscore the major role played by local actors beyond official regulation, the central issue of non-monetary values in the logic of organization they adopt and the intricate features of these operational semi-formal rules that shape the resource, define who’s in or out, and who gets what.