Context and Trade-Offs in Polycentric Governance of Organic Farming

The framework of polycentric governance conceptualizes the way public, private and civil society actors relate to each other in the provision and production of collective goods. It aims to understand what are the determinants of desirable forms of polycentric governance and what are contexts in which polycentric governance performs well, respectively how polycentric governance changes. It presumes that there is not one desirable polycentric governance, but many, and diverse tradeoffs. Recently, research on polycentric governance principally addressed conservation of natural resources focusing on public goods provision. This is surprising because, initially, the concept has been developed to analyze joint provision of collective and private goods, therefore foregrounding also the role of competition. This paper goes back to these origins looking at organic farming, which provides for food of certain standardized qualities and environmental benefits. The paper embraces the complexity of polycentric governance analysis and tries to navigate it through complementary use of consciously selected comparative cases and analysis of counterfactuals. Thus, the organic farming sectors in Denmark (publicly regulated) and Switzerland (privately regulated) are compared for the period 2000 until 2018. Data for the study has been collected throughout an extensive review of literature, grey reports and documents as well as 25 key informant interviews in the two countries. The analysis leads to substantive insights and starting points for further theorization of polycentric governance. It confirms that polycentric governance is highly resource intensive. This foregrounds the question who controls the resources for organizing the PSI, which lead to tensions within polycentric governance that trigger its dynamic change. Further, the analysis shows that access to polycentric governance of goods and services is key, and that, if given the chance private regulation may strive to limit access hindering an expansion of public goods provision in the interest of rents of insiders. Therefore, public control of access, as exercised in Denmark through a publicly controlled label may under certain conditions be beneficial to the quantitative expansion of public goods. However, intensity of engagement of producers as well as dynamics of innovation of standards relevant to production seem to be lowered where production standards are levelled by the public sector and tied to multi-level negotiation processes involving heterogeneous actors. While we argue for the possibility of analytically deriving described causal tendencies, we also acknowledge how constitutional and biophysical contexts shape the particularities of polycentric governance and its performance and challenges in each case. Thus, methodologically, the paper illustrates a productive way of analyzing the complexities of polycentric governance.