The ‘New Associationalism’ in agriculture: agro-food diversification and multifunctional production logics
研究欧洲农业企业如何通过构建关系网络实现多样化，并探讨这种多样化能否真正带来多功能农业所倡导的公共产品和优质食品。
The negative externalities of the agro-industrial production model are well documented. In the European Union, agro-food diversification is currently hailed as <it>the</it> means of delivering a new production logic, multifunctional agriculture, that advocates utilisation of territorially embedded assets to create public goods and quality foodstuffs. However, while an extensive economic geography literature exists on agro-food diversification, little work has examined how actors within businesses construct networks of relations to initiate this process and, hence, whether diversifying businesses can realistically deliver multifunctional outcomes. Building on the ‘relational turn’ in economic geography, I address this issue using fieldwork derived from agricultural businesses in the English east Midlands.