The participatory guarantee system in organic farming and food labels: Toward a reappropriation of intellectual commons
Sylvaine Lemeilleur, Gilles Allaire · Économie rurale · 2018
We consider the content of organic farming and food labels to be an intellectual common-pool resource. However, access to this resource is under threat from a phenomenon of commodification: third party certification, operated by competitive and private bodies, is becoming the only legal way for the public to access these labels. This expensive guarantee system excludes a large part of the communities from which the resource originated. In this paper, we describe an alternative mechanism: the participatory guarantee system. Drawing on Ostrom’s approach, we analyze the design principles that explain the effectiveness and sustainability of these systems and we argue that their development contributes to a reconquering of the commons.