Seeds of institutional change: How emerging initiatives create, maintain and disrupt institutions in the agro-food sector

There is an urgent need to transform our current unsustainable food systems. This transformation requires fundamental changes in agro-food policies, that despite recent attempts for reform still largely support unsustainable practices. At the same time, potentially disruptive initiatives have emerged, such as community-supported agriculture (CSA) or innovative circular agriculture initiatives. These emerging initiatives do not only develop and scale-up sustainable alternatives, but also aim to restructure and destabilize existing formal and informal institutions that support the status quo. Policy change requires a change of the wider institutional structures that underpin public policies, including regulative but also normative and cultural-cognitive institutions. We therefore study the potential of these emerging initiatives to change and disrupt their institutional environment. The question we address in this paper is: how do emerging initiatives influence their institutional environment? To answer this question, we use the theory of institutional work and combine it with theory on institutional change processes. In contrast to early institutional theory that attributed institutional change primarily to exogenous event such as wars and crises, these theories explore the possibilities for endogenous, actor-driven and more gradual institutional change. Institutional work refers to the purposive actions of actors to create, maintain and disrupt institutions. The framework proposes a set of actions through which actors influence the regulative, normative and cognitive pillars of institutions. To conceptualize the effect of these actions, we follow theories of institutional change that describes different institutional change processes: displacement, layering, conversion and drift. Empirically, we study the historical development of the initiatives of ‘Kipster’, a circular laying hen farm, and ‘Heerenboeren’, a CSA initiative, both situated in the Netherlands. Both of these cases have influenced existing institutions, e.g. around linear specialization and private ownership. We collected data through in-depth interviews with the initiators and other involved actors (e.g. banks, policymakers, NGOs) and by consulting relevant media sources like newspaper articles. The data was analysed using process-tracing techniques to uncover the key institutional work mechanisms through which institutions changed. We find that the initiatives engage in many forms of institutional work to create a more favourable institutional environment. The initiatives influence the regulative pillar of institutions through advocacy in networks of like-minded organizations. Furthermore, the initiatives influence normative institutions by changing normative associations and the construction of normative networks. The initiatives also engage in cognitive institutional work through educating, theorizing and mimicry. Importantly, through contrary practice, i.e. by showing sustainable alternatives, the initiatives undermine cognitive and normative assumptions that underpin existing institutions. Rather than opting for the disruption of institutions, the initiatives contribute to institutional change more indirectly through a process of adaptation: by creating new institutions alongside existing ones (institutional layering), repurposing existing institutions for alternative objectives (institutional conversion), and using the ambiguities in current institutions to their advantage (institutional drift). Our findings thus underscore the potential for more gradual, actor-driven institutional change. We end by discussing how a reinforcing dynamic between actor-driven bottom-up institutional change and top-down policy change may accelerate food system transformations.