The paper deals with a regional policy diffusion process in the field of organic agriculture. Due to the increasing demand for food, agriculture becomes an issue of growing global concern, particularly in the developing world. The problem of food insecurity is paralleled by increasing pressures on the world’s ecosystems, inter alia caused by the negative consequences of conventional agriculture. Policymakers and social scientists currently discuss the global food system to find new ways how to enable humans to feed themselves adequately without raiding and exploiting the environment. Organic agriculture is proposed as an alternative and sustainable food production technique to meet the global demand for food. In organic agriculture governance, a complex global architecture has emerged composed of coexisting public, private and public-private institutions, standards and norms on the transnational, regional and national level. However, there is also strong empirical evidence of growing harmonization and integration processes facilitated by transnational public-private or private networks. Our paper asks to what extend and why a common organic agriculture production standard has spread across developing countries. With reference to findings from policy diffusion research and literature on transnational advocacy networks we analyze the development process of the common East Africa Organic Agriculture Standard (EAOS). We show that the coordinated public-private approach of UNEP, UNCTAD and the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) successfully mobilized external, internal and horizontal pressures that influenced the governments of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi to adjust already existing national standards and to adopt the common regional standard in 2007.
