Chain-Wide Learning for Inclusive Agrifood Market Development

The purpose of this guide is to provide analytical tools for promoting engagement among governments, businesses and civil society to bring about policy change that enhances opportunities for small-scale producers in markets in which power is increasingly concentrated. It contains a detailed explanation of the approach as well as tips, guides, activities, etc for facilitating workshops with stakeholders. The approach emphasizes institutions, defined as “the implicitly and explicitly agreed ways of interacting (‘rules of the game’) that govern individual and collective behavior at different scales.” The methodology centers on the following six main activities:

1. Mapping out and analyzing the value chain
2. Mapping key policies and institutions
3. Establishing the key drivers, trends and issues affecting the value chain
4. Exploring potential outcomes
5. Identifying options for better inclusion of small-scale producers
6. Developing strategies for supporting change of policies and institutions

This approach helps to understand trust and incentives more thoroughly by taking defining “institutions” more broadly and examining all the formal and informal “rules,” patterns and behaviors in market systems, including language, beliefs, values, laws, social customs, etc. Institutions serve four main functions: meaning, association, control and action (see figure 3.3). Through these functions, they affect transaction costs, whether by lowering or raising them.

Tools:

• institutional matrix that can be mapped onto a value chain
• exercise for identifying future scenarios; this could be useful in thinking about the big picture while developing a competitiveness strategy
• activity for mapping out options for better inclusion of small-scale producers in markets (includes force field analysis and cause and effect mapping)
• activity for mapping strategies to support change—like an industry competitiveness strategy, but includes action planning matrix, matrix of stakeholder power and incentives, roles, etc.

This paper also contains useful info for the BEE and horizontal linkages wikis. The framework for understanding incentives, actors, actions and institutions shows that institutions (broadly defined) shape the goals and intentions of actors and create incentives, and then the actions taken reinforce or change institutions. The institutional and policy environment is mapped simultaneously to the value chain in this model, which is useful for identifying the institutions and policies that are critical to the inclusion or exclusion of small-scale producers.

Guidance for facilitating stakeholder workshops is given throughout, with tips related to each activity. The paper points out that the stakeholder workshop is not a one-time thing, but rather, “involves a series of interventions and activities over time to create the conditions, trust and understanding for different stakeholder groups to work together, reach collective decisions and take collective action” (p. 6:99). The chapter on stakeholder workshops also includes reasons for holding one, characteristics of stakeholder workshops, a checklist for designing and facilitating a stakeholder workshop, and sections on dealing with differences in capacity and power and managing conflict.