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Effective solutions to the ongoing “coral reef crisis” will remain limited until the underlying drivers of coral reef degradation are better understood. Here, we conduct a global-scale study of how four key metrics of ecosystem states and processes on coral reefs (top predator presence, reef fish biomass, trait diversity, and parrotfish scraping potential) are explained by 11 indicators based on key human-environment theories from the social sciences. Our global analysis of >1,500 reefs reveals three key findings. First, the proximity of the nearest market has the strongest and most consistent relationships with these ecosystem metrics. This finding is in keeping with a body of terrestrial research on how market accessibility shapes agricultural practices, but the integration of these concepts in marine systems is nascent. Second, our global study shows that resource conditions tend to display a n-shaped relationship with socioeconomic development. Specifically, the probabilities of encountering a top predator, fish biomass, and fish trait diversity were highest where human development was moderate but lower where development was either high or low. This finding contrasts with previous regional-scale research demonstrating an environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis (which predicts a U-shaped relationship between socioeconomic development and resource conditions). Third, together, our ecosystem metrics are best explained by the integration of different human-environment theories. Our best model includes the interactions between indicators from different theoretical perspectives, revealing how marine reserves can have different outcomes depending on how far they are from markets and human settlements, as well as the size of the surrounding human population.

Exposing injustice and inequality is a raison d’etre for sociology. Environmental sociologists interrogate not only the social and economic causes of ecological crises but the violence perpetuated ...

There has been a growing focus on uncertainty as a distinct concept in the risk literature. This paper is concerned with how those involved in the design and implementation of climate change policy...

Only a few months ago, the Australian Government was accused of undermining negotiations over implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement. Today, the world’s media is reporting that Australia is ...

While coral reefs in Australia have historically been a showcase of conventional management informed by research, recent declines in coral cover have triggered efforts to innovate and integrate intervention and restoration actions into management frameworks. Here we outline the multi-faceted intervention approaches that have developed in Australia since 2017, from newly implemented in-water programs, research to enhance coral resilience and investigations into socio-economic perspectives on restoration goals. We describe in-water projects using coral gardening, substrate stabilisation, coral repositioning, macro-algae removal, and larval-based restoration techniques. Three areas of research focus are also presented to illustrate the breadth of Australian research on coral restoration, (1) the transdisciplinary Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), one of the world’s largest research and development programs focused on coral reefs, (2) interventions to enhance coral performance under climate change, and (3) research into socio-cultural perspectives. Together, these projects and the recent research focus reflect an increasing urgency for action to confront the coral reef crisis, develop new and additional tools to manage coral reefs, and the consequent increase in funding opportunities and management appetite for implementation. The rapid progress in trialling and deploying coral restoration in Australia builds on decades of overseas experience, and advances in research and development are showing positive signs that coral restoration can be a valuable tool to improve resilience at local scales (i.e., high early survival rates across a variety of methods and coral species, strong community engagement with local stakeholders). RRAP is focused on creating interventions to help coral reefs at multiple scales, from micro scales (i.e., interventions targeting small areas within a specific reef site) to large scales (i.e., interventions targeting core ecosystem function and social-economic values at multiple select sites across the Great Barrier Reef) to resist, adapt to and recover from the impacts of climate change. None of these interventions aim to single-handedly restore the entirety of the Great Barrier Reef, nor do they negate the importance of urgent climate change mitigation action.

This chapter discusses what a more thoroughly globalized environmental sociology might look like, and the need to re-think more deeply the ways in which we conceptualize environmental sociology. Five challenges are discussed: i) the need to better understand globalization itself and the emergence of new sources and forms of authority; ii) the socially uneven causes and impacts of global environmental problems and injustices; iii) the task of democratizing science by asking whose voices are missing and whose knowledge counts in the understanding of global environmental matters; iv) the need for a more cosmopolitan environmental sociology that is sensitive both to local particularities and to shared concerns at the national and transnational levels; and v) the question of how environmental sociology might contribute to debate about possible and desirable global futures. The chapter concludes by arguing that responding to these challenges and engaging productively with other disciplines requires a sociology that unsettles boundaries between the social and natural sciences and partipates on equal terms in the production of environmental knowledge.

Sociology has made significant contributions to the conceptualisation of risk and critique of technical risk analysis. It has, however, unintentionally reinforced the division of labour between the natural/technical and social sciences in risk analysis. This paper argues that the problem with conceptualisations of risk is not a misplaced emphasis on calculation. Rather, it is that we have not adequately dealt with ontological distinctions implicit in both sociological and technical work on risk between material or objective risks and our socially-mediated understandings and interpretations of those risks. While acknowledging that risks are simultaneously social and technical, sociologists have not, in practice, provided the conceptual and methodological tools to apprehend risk in a less dualistic manner. This limits our ability both to analyse actors and processes outside the social domain and to explore the recursive relationships between risk calculus, social action and the material outcomes of risk. In response, this paper develops a material-semiotic conceptualisation of risk and provides an assessment of its relevance to more sociologically-informed risk governance. It introduces the ideas of co-constitution, emergent entities and enactment as instruments for reconciling the material and social worlds in a sociological study of risk. It further illustrates the application of a material-semiotic approach using these concepts in the nuclear industry. In deconstructing social-material dualisms in the sociology of risk, this paper argues that a material-semiotic conceptualisation of risk enables both technical and social perspectives on risk not only to co-exist but to collaborate, widening the scope for interdisciplinary research.

[Extract] Every now and then a concept comes along that shifts fundamentally, and in an enduring way, the ways in which we think and act. Rather more often, concepts come along that promise much but change little. Concepts that look set to capture the zeitgeist only to prove passing fads. Misdirections perhaps. Reinventions of the wheel. Unnecessary layers of semantic complication. So what is it with the Anthropocene? Useful neologism or gratuitous jargon? There is no doubting the popularity of the term among environmental scientists and social scientists. Increasingly common reference to ‘the Anthropocene’ in publications across the natural and social sciences suggests scholars have accepted, by-and-large, the basic proposition that we humans have become a force of nature in our own right (Steffen et al.2007).It suggests we have accepted that our interventions in the Earth’s biosphere are now so profound as to be written in its geological record. That the likely con-sequences are so great as to threaten undermining the climatic and ecological stability characteristic of the Holocene inter-glacial period. The great irony (or tragedy) in this being that we enter a period of heightened uncertainty which is entirely of our own making.

In late 2015, the majority of the world’s governments agreed to commenced implementation in 2016 of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development1 and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.2 No one w...

This chapter reviews the conceptualisation of 'consumption' in both the production-focussed rural sociology and consumption-focussed sociology of food literatures. It discusses these in the context of a small pilot study into food consumption and regional identities conducted in Rockhampton - Australia's self-proclaimed 'Beef Capital' - with particular emphasis on the ways in which the gendering of foods shapes consumption and production practices. Women's domestic labour was thus commoditised and converted into an arena of accumulation, shifting the focus of the home from a site of production to a site of consumption. The consumption-focussed theorists suggest that the most sociologically significant moment in the consumption of food lies in its appropriation into the human body, rather than its exchange as a commoditised good. Ambivalencies around meat consumption also took on gendered dimensions, although there was little obvious evidence of the sort of revulsion or unease reported by other studies about the origins of meat.

The most striking feature of the irrigated cotton industry is the intensive nature of the production system which is characterised by a high level of chemical inputs and high risk capital outlays, with yield and profit dependent on a guaranteed water supply and technological 'solutions' to production problems. The approach to the cotton industry in Emerald was initially made through the local Cotton Growers and Irrigators Association and resulted in the formation of one group of approximately ten growers. The group has persisted in researching the technology through the monitoring of established sites in the local region, and visiting other sites which use the technology throughout Australia's cotton growing areas. The Local best practices (LBP) approach is a participative group-extension method which is based on a 'farmer first' or 'bottom-up' paradigm. The LBP method of extension provides a structured mechanism to encourage producers to develop and utilise local knowledge.

This chapter explores how time and temporality—that is, the rhythms and tempos of social and environmental change—have been considered in social theory before going on to explore the conceptual frameworks and practices through which policy-makers seek to influence temporal processes in the specific context of climate change policy. The chapter highlights conflict between the temporalities of climate change and the temporalities of politics, as well as conflict between the temporalities of competing political and decision-making processes. While policy-makers advocate strategies to depoliticize climate policy in response to these conflicts, the chapter argues this is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, it advocates more democratic and deliberative approaches to the challenge of synchronizing ever more visible ecological temporalities with the multiple temporalities of the social.

This concluding chapter begins by elaborating on the importance of conceptual pluralization and reflexivity to confront contemporary tendencies of denialism and anti-reflexivity. It then offers critical reflections on the concepts explored in this volume, by returning to the three questions raised in the introductory chapter: What is the explanatory value of these concepts? What biases and blinders are embedded within them? What sort of action-orientation can they inspire? The chapter then discusses how a more robust and sociologically-informed understanding of society-environment relations, and its many spheres of structure and agency, can enrich our understanding of environmental degradation, complexity, social inertia and conditions for social transformation. The closing section addresses the critical role of sociological imagination and reflexivity to explore what future(s) may lie ahead.

The expansion of retailer-led food production standards over recent years has seen certification against such standards become a de facto condition of access to numerous supply chains. GLOBALG.A.P. standards, in particular, have extended the traditional focus of retailer-led standards beyond food safety to include compliance points addressing environmental protection and labour welfare. This has stimulated considerable research on the implications of standards compliance for small producers. However, little attention has been paid either to the relationships between so-called private standards and state-based regulatory regimes or to the implications of standards compliance for corporate farms, their employees and neighbouring communities. This paper examines these relationships and implications in the context of plantation banana production in the Philippines, focussing, in particular, on gaps that emerge between the ideals of social and environmental responsibility embodied in private standards and actual practices of regulation. It finds that while compliance with private standards is associated with comparatively favourable treatment of labour, deference to poorly enforced national legislation conceals ongoing human rights and environmental concerns.

[Extract] Attempts to summarize key themes in environmental sociology – the sorts of summaries we find in review articles, 'state of the art' handbooks and introductory texts – usually present environmental sociology as a series of debates: (1) constructivism versus materialism; (2) eco- logical modernization versus ecological realism; and (3) European versus North American sociology.¹ Sometimes, these debates are explicitly mapped onto to each other – giving us something like 'constructivist European ecological modernizationists' versus 'critical American material realists'. Sometimes, this mapping is implied. Of course, any attempt to summarize a field must impose some kind of order and 'key debates' may, in principle, be as useful a way to do this as any other. No-one means to imply that environmental sociology can be split neatly down the middle, leaving two distinct paradigmatic communities fighting it out for theoretical and geopolitical supremacy. The real world, everyone will admit, is more complex, more fluid and, thankfully, more interesting. There is always room towards the end of handbooks and review essays for a section on 'the Other'– whether this Other be scholarship from outside the USA and Europe or the emergence of new theoretical or empirical concerns. It's just that some problems, places and conceptual frameworks tend to dominate scholarship and debate. Or do they?

[Extract] Environmental sociologists have a long-held ambition to transform sociology – to outgrow our sub-disciplinary niche and redefine the mainstream. Many of us firmly believe that environmental sociology requires us to rethink the foundational principles of sociology and indeed the very concept of 'social sciences'. We believe such a rethinking is critical to the ongoing relevance of the social sciences in an era of global environmental change. But have we ever settled on what environmental sociology actually is?

This paper introduces the Special Volume on sustainable and responsible supply chain governance. As globalized supply chains cross multiple regulatory borders, the firms involved in these chains come under increasing pressure from consumers, NGOs and governments to accept responsibility for social and environmental matters beyond their immediate organizational boundaries. Governance arrangements for global supply chains are therefore increasingly faced with sustainability requirements of production and consumption. Our primary objectives for this introductory paper are to explore the governance challenges that globalized supply chains and networks face in becoming sustainable and responsible, and thence to identify opportunities for promoting sustainable and responsible governance. In doing so, we draw on 16 articles published in this Special Volume of the Journal of Cleaner Production as well as upon the broader sustainable supply chain governance literature. We argue that the border-crossing nature of global supply chains comes with six major challenges (or gaps) in sustainability governance and that firms and others attempt to address these using a range of tools including eco-labels, codes of conduct, auditing procedures, product information systems, procurement guidelines, and eco-branding. However, these tools are not sufficient, by themselves, to bridge the geographical, informational, communication, compliance, power and legitimacy gaps that challenge sustainable global chains. What else is required? The articles in this Special Volume suggest that coalition and institution building on a broader scale is essential through, for example, the development of inclusive multi-stakeholder coalitions; flexibility to adapt global governance arrangements to local social and ecological contexts of production and consumption; supplementing effective monitoring and enforcement mechanisms with education and other programs to build compliance capacity; and integration of reflexive learning to improve governance arrangements over time.

[Extract] Poverty is not only an evil in itself, but sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for a better life. A world in which poverty is endemic will always be prone to ecological and other catastrophes. (WCED 1987, 8) One of the standout features of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in early 2016 as part of its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the prominence of distinctly social objectives (see Lockie 2016). Goals 1 – 5 target an end to poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education and gender equality. Goal 10 aims to reduce inequality within and between nations. Goal 16 addresses peace, justice and the institutional infrastructure required to deliver them. Several of the more overtly environmental and economic goals are qualified with social objectives. Energy, for example, should be accessible and affordable. Economic growth should be shared. Work should be productive and rewarding. Cities should be safe and inclusive. Collectively, moreover, the SDGs are seen as integrated, indivisible and universal. No-one is to be left behind.

[Extract] One aspect of governance and regulation that tends to be persistently overlooked is the role of private actors, particularly as standard-setting agencies. Historically, industry bodies have traditionally set standards in specific fields (Schepel 2005: 145). In recent years, however, private standards have taken on significance as regulatory tools. While much has been written about the implications of private standards and standardisation (e.g. Marx et al. 2012; Casey 2009; Henson and Humphrey 2009; Havinga 2006), very little has been written about how standards become such regulatory tools. Unpacking the ‘black box’ of standardisation to see how it works is a neglected field of inquiry. This chapter makes a contribution to redressing this situation. We do so by applying the work of regulatory scholars, Julia Black, John Braithwaite and Ian Ayres, to a transnational, private standard-setting organisation, GLOBALG.A.P. We use Black’s (2001) work on ‘decentred regulation’ and Ayres and Braithwaite’s (1992) work on ‘responsive regulation’ to account for private actors as regulators in a multi-level governance structure.

[Extract] In some ways, the answer is obvious. As the scale of human intervention in the Earth's ecosystems and climate grows, and as the magnitude of risk associated with global environmental change becomes clearer, it seems inconceivable that any social science could ignore the relationships between environment and society. Self-evidently, failure to engage with environmental change would be to miss a major consequence, and driver, of social change. Just as importantly, failure to engage with environmental change would see opportunities go begging to participate in progressive social and political action. For the sake of both validity and relevance, sociology needs to 'ecologize'.

In the context of the changing socio-economic position of agriculture, this paper is concerned with the governmental relations associated with managing the decoupling of society from economy and the ensuing question about how the economic base can be adequately utilised to ensure continued material sustenance for the community. Central to these challenges is the role of social policy in co-ordinating processes of change against society's capacity for change, taking into account the increasing realisation that the both the capacity of the planet and its economies are finite. Localism is increasingly being promoted as a key social strategy which communities can use to address their needs to secure material sustenance. Under this form of localism, communities are required to secure their own socio-economic sustainability by taking an entrepreneurial approach to developing their local assets and resources. Societies are facing questions about the viability of both interventionist and market-based approaches f...

International horticulture markets are increasingly governed by transnational private regulations that create a new set of challenges not only for the market but also for local governance and policy regimes. Accordingly, resources from a range of international governance institutions and donors promoting development through neoliberal market rules have been directed towards ensuring that market entry barriers are not prohibitive. This paper presents the results of a recent study undertaken in Vietnam that assessed outcomes within a single value chain governed by GLOBALG.A.P, where technical and financial assistance were provided to smallholders. The constructivist approach highlights that, in addition to typical market entry barriers, additional obstacles existed that prevented smallholders from market participation. These were socially, culturally and historically situated and rooted in informal institutions. Failing to incorporate these into assistance planning may lead to the unequal distribution of de...

For almost two decades, community Landcare groups and supporting institutional bodies were the focus of agri-environmental policy in Australia. Despite the successes of Landcare, the programme faces challenges securing funding in an era of agri-environmental policy that preferences economic mechanisms, such as market-based instruments, for devolving funding. This longitudinal study examines how Landcare group activity and membership in one catchment have changed over the last decade. Community Landcare groups in the study area were in ‘sleeper mode’ or had ceased to exist, partially as a result of funding and structural arrangements and several other factors that undermined both community Landcare groups and the regional Landcare network.

With the majority of Australia's natural resources located on privately managed land, there is an imperative for governments to engage land managers in conservation practices that maintain or improve biodiversity. Reflecting the belief that markets lead to a superior allocation of resources, market-based instruments (MBIs) are being applied to a range of environmental issues across Australia. This article reviews the outcomes of three projects that targeted biodiversity conservation on agricultural land in Central Queensland. It examines the purpose for engagement with these programs, and whether the outcomes align with eight key arguments for the use of MBIs. This study suggests that while short-term and targeted environmental goals were achieved, arguably the most important outcomes of these projects were their capacity to build support networks, foster communication between natural resource management agency staff and landholders, and promote a greater appreciation for the relationships betwee...

Market-based instruments (MBIs) are promoted as economically efficient, targeted solutions to otherwise intractable environmental policy problems with additional potential to improve the livelihood security of ecosystem service providers. This paper argues that the effectiveness of MBIs (and the likelihood therefore of sustained environmental and social outcomes) depends on a number of often unacknowledged assumptions about the distribution of benefits arising from ecosystem service provision, the rights and duties associated with resource access, and the fitness for purpose of various policy instruments. These assumptions are illustrated and discussed using The Benefit Flows and Property Rights Matrix. It is argued that the legitimacy of MBIs depends both on the demonstrability of distinct public benefit and of acceptance among the wider community that private resource users ought to be compensated in some way for the provision of that benefit. Effective provision of ecosystem services through a market-mechanism thereafter depends on a range of additional conditions including inter-changeability of supply, scalability, lack of corroboration, adequate information, financial capacity, clarity of property rights, clarity of resource access-related duties and institutional capacity. Meeting these conditions is not simply a matter of appropriate incentive design but of political decision-making, moral judgement and social learning. Failure to recognise these conditions potentially undermines the effectiveness not only of MBIs but of alternative policy measures taken contemporaneously with MBIs such as community-based natural resource management.

[Extract] In October 2005, Nestle, the largest of the world's big four coffee multinationals, launched a certified fair trade coffee in the United Kingdom. With net profits in 2005 of approximately US$6.5 billion from the sale of some 8500 product lines (Nestle 2007), the introduction by Nestle of a single fair trade product to just one of the countries in which it operates was bound to generate cynicism. By contrast, the involvement in fair trade of Starbucks - the world's largest 'specialty' coffee roaster and retailer - has invited a more mixed response. In the fiscal year 2006, Starbucks purchased some 8 million kilograms of certified fair trade coffee. This represented 14 per cent of global fair trade coffee imports and about 6 per cent of Starbucks' own coffee requirements, making Starbucks the largest importer of fair trade coffee in North America (Starbucks 2007). According to civil society organisations, however, Starbucks' entry into fair trade has been a slow and reluctant response to campaigning and consumer pressure (Renard 2003).

The role of private food standards in agriculture is increasingly raising questions of legitimacy, particularly in light of the impacts such standards may have on food producers. While much work has been carried out at a macro policy level for developing countries, there have been rela- tively few empirical case studies that focus on particular food supply chains, and even fewer studies still of the impact of private standards on developed countries such as Australia. This study seeks to address this imbalance, with a particular focus on examining the impact of private standards on an Australian vegetable supply food system in North Tasmania as well as tracing the impact of perceived and actual power relations among actors. Applying a governance framework and adopting a Foucauldian position we show that private standards are a ''technology of power'' that have risen out of a crisis discourse in the mid-1990s about on-farm food safety. Private standards have the effect of using knowledge from particular actors to establish truths about good agri- cultural practice (GAP), however we show that Tasmanian vegetable growers are not docile bodies and are employing alternative knowledge and technologies of power to chal- lenge how GAP is implemented on-farm.

Retailer-led food standards are playing an increasingly important role in determining market access globally. These standards are generally interpreted as a mechanism by which retailers have increased their capacity to co-ordinate and control upstream actors, including farmers and processors. Taking an actor-oriented approach to determine the various ways in which a group of farmers respond to retailer-led standards, this study presents empirical detail on the impacts of compliance with retailer-led standards, including GLOBALG.A.P, on an Australian citrus growers' co-operative. This study found that while GLOBALG.A.P and similar standards are indeed de facto mandatory requirements for fruit producers, it was not certification to GLOBALG.A.P alone that led to relationships of dependency between producers and retailers. The oligopolistic structure of the retailing sector was found to be equally problematic for producers. This suggests that while GLOBALG.A.P constituted a novel form of value chain governance, it was not a defining feature of the food production system in these chains.

Australia's National Landcare Program is popularly seen as a successful attempt to address rural land degradation in a cooperative and coordinated manner. Involving everyone from community Landcare groups to the corporate sector and government agencies, "landcare" is seen to have become something bigger than the program that spawned it. In lieu of convincing evidence that Landcare has transformed agricultural practices in a demonstrably sustainable direction, this high level of involvement is itself cited as a measure of success. Such a view, however, pays little attention to competing conceptualization's of what "landcare" actually means, to the power relationships between those involved, or to the multitude of other social projects in which those involved are engaged. The failure to address these issues masks the extent to which Landcare both contributes to the further intensification of farming practices, and is used as a signifier of environmental and social responsibility in the greening of the corporate images of its sponsors. By sponsoring Landcare initiatives companies gain licensed access to use of the Landcare Australia logo and may position themselves as responsible corporate citizens, irrespective of the environmental effects of their own products and manufacturing processes. A form of "green consumerism" is thereby constituted through which consumption is directed not towards the products of farmers attempting to produce more sustainably, but towards the companies that ostensibly support their efforts to do so.

Two social impact assessment (SIA) studies of Central Queensland's Coppabella coal mine were undertaken in 2002–2003 and 2006–2007. As ex post studies of actual change, these provide a reference point for predictive assessments of proposed resource extraction projects at other sites, while the longitudinal element added by the second study illustrates how impacts associated with one mine may vary over time due to changing economic and social conditions. It was found that the traditional coupling of local economic vitality and community development to the life cycle of resource projects—the resource community cycle—was mediated by labour recruitment and social infrastructure policies that reduced the emphasis on localised employment and investment strategies, and by the cumulative impacts of multiple mining projects within relative proximity to each other. The resource community cycle was accelerated and local communities forced to consider ways of attracting secondary investment and/or alternative industries early in the operational life of the Coppabella mine in order to secure significant economic benefits and to guard against the erosion of social capital and the ability to cope with future downturns in the mining sector.

Extensive forms of resource use are rarely subject to detailed environmental and social assessment. This paper outlines a potential methodology for assessment of the social impacts of extensive resource use activities based on the Pressure-State-Impact-Response (PSIR) model of integrated indicator development. It then tests this methodology through a case study of changed water flow regimes in Central Queensland's Fitzroy River catchment. While resource degradation associated with interruptions to flow was expected to force all resource users to face higher costs and greater uncertainty, negative social impacts were particularly concentrated among vulnerable groups and downstream industries. Extension of the PSIR framework and methodology proved useful in linking social and biophysical research and would thus appear to offer some potential as a model for incorporating social concerns within natural resource decision making.

International agreements highlight the centrality of agricultural biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides to human well-being, but provide little guidance on how to integrate agrobiodiversity within workable national regimes of governance. Complicating this picture further, it is not species richness per se that underwrites the resilience and productivity of agroecosystems but the functional relationships between organisms and ecosystem components at a variety of scales. Like many others, Australia's national strategy for biodiversity conservation acknowledges the importance of functional biodiversity but, in reality, focuses most attention on the protection of `wild' biodiversity from unsympathetic land use. In constructing a workable regime of governance for agricultural biodiversity, Australian governments have been particularly concerned to maintain and extend the neoliberal project of market rule. Biodiversity loss is defined as an outcome of market failure best addressed through various types of market reform. However, new tensions have been created between the totalizing logic of market rule and the spatio-temporal variability and specificity of biodiversity management. Despite the positive emphasis of Australian agri-environmental policy on planning and capacity building, declining terms of trade for agricultural produce are likely to make it very difficult for the majority of landholders to actively manage biological resources for which there are no direct and immediate productivity benefits.

With “consumer demand” credited with driving major changes in the food industry related to food quality, safety, environmental, and social concerns, the contemporary politics of food has become characterized by a variety of attempts to redefine food consumption as an expression of citizenship that speaks of collective rights and responsibilities. Neoliberal political orthodoxy constructs such citizenship in terms of the ability of individuals to monitor and regulate their own behavior as entrepreneurs and as consumers. By contrast, many proponents of alternative food networks promote the idea that food citizenship is expressed through participation in social arrangements based on solidarity and coordinated action rather than on contractual and commoditized relationships between so-called “producers” and “consumers.” This paper thus focuses its analysis on the strategies used to mobilize people as consumers of particular products and the ways, in turn, in which people use their consumption choices as expressions of social agency or citizenship. In particular, the paper examines how the marketing, pricing, and distribution of foods interact with food standards to enable and constrain specific expressions of food citizenship. It is argued that narrow and stereotypical constructions of the “ethical consumer” help to limit the access of particular people and environmental values, such as biodiversity, to the ethical marketplace.