Standard Research Grant: Contending with Metrics in the Corporate Food Supply Chain

一般受众概述本研究项目研究食品供应链，重点是从可认证的食品质量和安全标准向生态效率指标的转变；这种转变可能更抽象地描述为从确保遵守转向促进正在进行的可衡量的改进。该项目的主要目标是了解这种转变的驱动力和影响。它将检验两个相关的假设。首先，这一转变旨在产生关于可持续发展在粮食供应链中意味着什么的全球共同知识，包括如何衡量和改进可持续发展，并这样做是为了解决人们对可持续获得农业原材料日益增长的关切。其次，促进可衡量改进的需要要求全球食品公司以新的方式应对当地环境、做法和供应商的知识，这样做有可能在全球范围内重塑企业食品供应链治理。与相关供应链参与者的本能接触将鼓励各方开阔视野。这项研究的结果将在学术和行业出版物和演示文稿中广泛传播，这将进一步增强积极变化的前景。技术总结采用多地点人种学，并汇集供应链、标准和企业知识生产方面的学术知识，该项目将审查基于衡量标准的治理在多个利益相关者倡议和企业食品供应链中的出现，在企业食品供应链中，中层可持续发展经理努力争取广泛的其他行为者来衡量和实现改进。该项目包括一项针对奶农的试点研究，他们已成为行业项目评估和改进的中心目标。国际和平协会有现有的联系，最近与可持续发展联盟建立了联系，这将极大地促进该项目的开展。该项目将STS和政治生态的研究人员带入了更密切的对话，并在一个新的经验领域做到了这一点。虽然这两个领域都探索了标准的生产和管理能力，但该项目将它们结合在一起，分析以结果为基础的指标作为私人食品治理工具的兴起。该项目从STS中汲取见解，以检查可持续发展的含义和衡量标准是如何在不同的社会环境中共同产生的，并追踪它们是如何部署的，或许是跨空间和供应链竞争的。该项目遵循政治生态，根据更广泛的政治-经济和环境条件分析了基于指标的治理的出现。在这样做的过程中，这项研究考虑了使指标可操作的情境、社会技术工作，特别是在农场层面，本身可能导致治理工作方式的变化。

General Audience Summary This research project studies food supply chains with a focus on the shift from certifiable standards of food quality and safety to metrics of ecological efficiency; the shift may be characterized more abstractly as a move away from ensuring compliance to promoting ongoing measurable improvement. The primary goal of the project is to understand the driving forces and implications of this shift. It will test two related hypotheses. First, that the shift aims to produce common global knowledge about what sustainability means in food supply chains, including how it can be measured and improved, and that it does so in order to address growing concerns about sustained access to agricultural raw materials. Second, the need to promote measurable improvement requires global food companies to contend with the local environments, practices, and knowledge of suppliers in new ways, and that doing so has the potential to reshape corporate food supply chain governance on a global scale. Reflexive engagement with pertinent supply chain actors will encourage broadened perspectives on all sides. The results of the study will be widely disseminated in both scholarly and trade publications and presentations, which will further enhance the prospects for positive change.Technical Summary Employing multi-sited ethnography and drawing together scholarship on supply chains, standards, and corporate knowledge production, the project will examine the emergence of metrics-based governance both in multi-stakeholder initiatives and in the corporate food supply chains where mid-level sustainability managers work to enlist a wide range of other actors in their efforts to measure and achieve improvement. The project includes a pilot study of dairy farmers, who have become central targets of industry projects to assess and improve. The PI has existing contacts and has recently established access to the Sustainability Consortium, which will greatly facilitate carrying out the project. The project brings researchers in STS and political ecology into closer conversation and it does so in a new empirical terrain. While both fields have explored the production and governing power of standards, this project brings them together to analyze the rise of outcome-based metrics as tools of private food governance. The project draws insights from STS to examine how meanings and metrics of sustainability are co-produced in different social settings, and to trace how they are deployed and perhaps contested across space and supply chains. Following political ecology, the project analyzes the emergence of metrics-based governance in light of broader political-economic and environmental conditions. In doing so, this research considers how the situated, sociotechnical work of making metrics actionable, particularly at the farm level, could in itself lead to changes in how governance works.