Governance mechanisms in food community networks

This paper discusses the concept of the food community network (FCN) and how consumers and farmers organize credence food transactions. The FCN is based on pooling specific resources and using membership-based contracts to assign decision and property rights. It implies an organization based on a combination of several democratic and communitarian elements, with few market-like and bureaucratic elements. By applying arguments from new institutional economics and organizational science, case studies on community-supported agriculture reported elsewhere were used to describe how FCN governance works. The results indicate a great variety of FCN organizational forms.