Institutional change in community-based management for organic labeling: a case study from a Participatory Guarantee System in France

This paper investigates how the process of institutional change shapes community-based organizations, by considering both formal and informal governance rules over several different periods. For this purpose, we examine how the community-based management of organic farming has changed in the past five decades. The French association, Nature & Progrès (N&P), adopted a “Participatory Guarantee System” (PGS) to monitor compliance with their organic standard, created in 1972. Yet, following the European regulation “Organic Agriculture” enforced in 1995, N&P was excluded from the public policy framework for organic farming, which was reserved for operators that were certified by a third party. Ostrom and Basurto’s (Journal of Institutional Economics, 7(3), 3, 2011) analytical tool is useful to describe the changes in collective rules. Drawing on original data collected from N&P, we examine how institutional changes in the European legislation have affected the governance of a community-based certification scheme. We focus on prescriptions that rely on internal or external sanction mechanisms and discuss the implications for enforcement. Our results show that the N&P structure has become an institutionalized PGS. N&P members have managed to build a complex governance system to certify organic products despite the European restriction on access to the organic label. However, the conformity system used by local groups is largely based on unwritten norms, which can cause confusion and conflicts between users, especially since PGS communities are “evolving communities.”