Abstract
This chapter deals specifically with the many forms of collective action that family farmers undertake. It focuses, on the one hand, on the diversity of functions performed through collective action and, on the other, on the deeply evolutionary nature of organizational forms developed – even though some are part of long-term trends – and concentrates on three specific issues: innovation, insertion of agricultural products into markets, and the formulation and orientation of public policy. These multiple commitments have contributed in a more general way to the consolidation of local democracy where organizations of family farmers play an important role. Farmers have been coming together in organizations for a very long time in Western European countries and in those which experienced high levels of European emigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The movement is slower and more recent in developing countries; it follows on from the independence of former colonies and the democratization movements of the 1990s. And yet, collective dynamics in these countries often play today a central role in local and national political arenas.
Keywords
- Civil Society
- Collective Action
- Family Farmer
- Authoritarian Regime
- Political Regime
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This is a universal trait that has been observed across societies and their histories, and is aptly underlined by the subtitle of the work of Crozier and Friedberg (1977): “Constraints to collective action.”
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The distinction between what is internal and what is external is often difficult to pin down. Not only do we consider organized interactions with actors of formal support mechanisms, we also take into account the intrinsic learning capacities of individuals and communities through their own informal networking (opportunities for geographical mobility and openings to new ideas, new worlds, new ways of living, etc.).
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The normative framework is considered, on the one hand, as a set of general principles, legally formalized standards, laws and mechanisms that prescribe individual and organizational actions and, on the other, in a more cognitive approach, as the production of normative structures by actors in a position to give meaning to their actions (Lascoumes 2006).
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WAEMU: West African Economic and Monetary Union; ECOWAS: Economic Community of West African States; Mercosur: Southern Common Market.
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In particular, see the journal Participations, http://www.cairn.info/revue-participations-2011-1.htm, retrieved 19 February 2014.
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Bosc, PM., Piraux, M., Dulcire, M. (2015). Contributing to Innovation, Policies and Local Democracy Through Collective Action. In: Sourisseau, JM. (eds) Family Farming and the Worlds to Come. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9358-2_9
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