City Networks and the Promotion of Voluntary Agri-Food Standards

City networks in the agri-food sector have become incredibly large, and include such networks as Fair Trade Towns (FFT) International and Biostaedte (organic towns). Both networks encompass private actors and rely on voluntary certification: Suppliers disclose information and certifiers guarantee compliance with Fair Trade or EU Organic standards. Following this idea, FFT and Biostadt member cities, such as Erfurt, Freiburg and Leipzig in Germany, have committed to increasingly purchase from fair trade- and organic-certified producers. However, while city networks claim to help implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities), scholars have shown that certification programs emerged from a neoliberal agenda, and have remained cautious about their intended impact, especially, in the Global South. Voluntary certification has paid little consideration of the terms of producers’ participation in certified markets, or the distribution of benefits and constraints among actors involved. The costs of certification often turn out to be too high for smallholders (Bennett, 2017; Bucagu et al., 2014). Moreover, certification has been shown to reproduce power asymmetries by building upon images of Southern community producers as authentic and exotic ‘others’ (Nygren, 2015). Hence, most scholars doubt that certification programs change power imbalances in trade relations and food governance. Only a few scholars have considered the possibility of voluntary certification “privatizing up” existing rules (Cashore et al., 2004; Ruggie, 2013). Complementing these studies, this paper aims to develop better empirical and theoretical understandings of the power of cities in the promotion of voluntary standards. Drawing on concepts of “power over” (coercion and manipulation), “power to” (empowerment and resistance) and “power with” (cooperation and learning), I identify types of relations through which local governmental and private, including business, actors can bring about policy change, or whether they face structural constraints. The sample includes the Biostaedte network with 14 cities in Germany and the FFT-program with 614 cities in Germany and 2,195 cities worldwide. Methods include literature review, document analysis and expert interviews. My central research questions are: How and when can local governments contribute to the promotion of voluntary standards? And does the promotion of agri-food standards allow cities to contribute to SDG2 and 11?