Cultivating Relational Values: Redistribution and Reciprocity in Sustainable Agriculture

This paper focuses on how current approaches to improving sustainability in agricultural systems reflect the relational values of redistribution and reciprocity. As an activity located at the human-environment interface,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper focuses on how current approaches to improving sustainability in agricultural systems reflect the relational values of redistribution and reciprocity. As an activity located at the human-environment interface, agriculture and the values embedded within it have received attention among scholars and theorists past and present. From a Polanyian relational values perspective, the concepts of redistribution and reciprocity have figured prominently in considerations of the relationships within society and between society and nature. Redistribution refers to the reallocation of wealth, power, and resources in pursuit of greater social equity, while reciprocity is the exchange of goods and services to attain mutual and equitable benefit. These values have been identified and explored in many social relationships, including those in agrarian societies, and they continue to be relevant as concepts and categories for understanding both societal goals and institutional approaches to improving sustainability in agri-food systems.

We first present a brief historical overview of reciprocity and redistribution as two relational values theorized to underlay decision-making and systems for peasant and smallholder agriculture. We then review the foundations of key contemporary approaches to increasing sustainability in agriculture that reflect these same values, including third-party certifications, value chain development, food sovereignty, and agroecology. Drawing on a systematic literature review, the paper then synthesizes recent analyses and critiques of these efforts toward agricultural sustainability that implicitly or explicitly purport to incorporate the relational values of redistribution and reciprocity. We conclude by arguing that three categorizations are useful to characterize how relational values are embedded in contemporary sustainable agriculture efforts. Some efforts employ relational values only as an instrumental means to support market values, while other efforts were initially premised on relational values but have been co-opted by the rationale of market society. Finally, there are efforts to improve sustainability in agriculture that start from relational values and seek to transform the food system with the goals of self-determination and regenerative natural resource management, rather than maximization of efficiency and profit. The differences in how relational values are integrated into efforts pursuing agricultural sustainability affect their potential and actual outcomes in ways that are not uniformly positive or negative, but instead reflect the complexity of employing a range of values for managing and adapting agri-food systems.