Governance Mechanisms in Food Community Networks

Urban Farm DB summary

This paper discusses the concept of the food community network (FCN) — an organizational model in which consumers and farmers use membership-based contracts to pool resources and assign decision and property rights for credence food transactions, combining democratic and communitarian elements with few market or bureaucratic elements — and applies new institutional economics and organizational science arguments to case studies of community-supported agriculture reported elsewhere, finding a wide variety of FCN organizational forms.