| dc.description.abstract | With over 4 million tonnes produced globally and a net worth topping US$21 billion annually, cocoa is one of the most traded agri-food commodities worldwide. While few large competitors dominate the processing and manufacturing phase, millions of small farmers directly depend on the commodity for their livelihood at the production level. However, several sustainability challenges such as deforestation, soil degradation and poor working conditions are hindering the future availability of the crop and the well being of the communities involved in its production. Stakeholders active in the sector have reacted to these challenges by embracing new forms of cooperation and self-regulation, resulting in the emergence of various Sustainable Supply Chain Governance (SSCG) arrangements. So far, numerous investigations have been conducted examining the role of these new actors in ensuring the environmental, social and economic well-being of the communities where cocoa is sourced. However, the majority of these evaluations tend to focus on the same type of arrangement such as voluntary third-party standards, while providing contradictory views regarding their actual benefits to producers. As a common feature to many of these arrangements is the delivery of services to farmers, this research explores a new approach linking service delivery to improvements in farmers’ performance. A causal model is proposed combining a theory of change approach to Service Delivery Models (SDM) used to identify services exchange between actors active in global value chains. Combining the causal pathway thinking introduced by a theory of change approach to SDM enables further evaluation of these services, whilst disentangling the underlying mechanisms and decision making processes leading to desired improvements in the sustainability performance of farmers. To test the validity of the model a mixed case-study approach is used including interviews, open-ended questionnaires and secondary data review with stakeholders active in the Colombian cacao sector. The selected case studies represent two main public and private players active in the country’s cacao sector, providing evidence from a country-undergoing major political and industry transformations. The findings show that the application of the model can deliver important insights on the relationship between service provision and outcomes at the farm level, while taking into account external factors which might influence the observed changes in outcomes. In particular, the results show that both the investigated parties have set up a good delivery of different services complementing each other. However, external factors such as availability of physical resources and the institutional characteristics of the entity providing services can hinder adequate delivery in practice. This is reflected in the adoption of agricultural practices between the two cases, and in turn on the outcomes at farm level in terms of productivity and quality of the final product. The application of the model to the chosen case studies also identified the persistence of issues with data availability between actors at different levels of the value chain. This hinders cooperation efforts at higher levels to achieve the desired improvements in farmers’ learning on the ground, affecting their sustainability performance and also livelihoods. Recommendation for pratictioners and academia are reported based on the study findings. | |
