Geographical Indications in Brazilian Food Markets: Quality Conventions, Institutionalization, and Path Dependence

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the institutionalization of the Geographical Indications (GI) system in Brazil. Emphasis is placed on the evaluative disputes underway in hybrid forums where different actors seek to build compromises concerning production rules and standards. Linking economic sociology and a conventionalist approach to market institutions, analysis highlights the different understandings of GIs as they emerge from the discourses and practices of actors involved in food qualification processes. The results are derived from research conducted in the most important GI areas in Brazil over the last six years. That research demonstrates that GI projects have been developed without a stabilized institutional frame, thus leading to the reproduction of a variety of subsystems implemented within different territorial and sectoral contexts. This, in turn, has created several obstacles to market development.For a decade or so, Brazil has been witnessing the emergence of a market for products with Geographical Indications (GI). This is a distinctive sign that emphasizes the sociocultural embeddedness of goods. It recognizes traditions, habits, practices, and knowledge associated with a territorial identity and a specific geographic origin (Barham 2003; Berard and Marchenay 2008; Vandecandelaere et al. 2009). The architecture of this market reveals itself to be one of the most eloquent expressions of the current quality turn in agri-food markets. It is a movement characterized by the accelerated development of a wide range of differentiation devices (organic, fair-trade, local foods, etc.), each of which structures networks, institutions, and certification systems specifically connected to a set of quality conventions (Allaire 2010; Goodman 2003; Wilkinson 2007). The creation of the GI system within the Brazilian context offers a distinctive example of social construction of markets that articulates three simultaneous processes. First, the market structure requires the development of a social network including a variety of actors involved in new production and consumption circuits (producers, consumers, associations, government). Second, to render an organized and well-established network, a stable institutional arrangement (laws, norms, rules, and conventions) that allows the actors to exchange must be defined. Linked to this there is a process of negotiation around the configuration of a specific convention of quality for GI products, generating compromises between different evaluative conceptions. These processes are responsible for what we call institutionalization of the GI system, in other words, the construction of systems of established and prevalent social rules that structure social interactions, defining who has the right to participate in the market, what goods can be part of transactions, how exchanges should unfold, and what the rights and obligations of each economic agent are (Hodgson 2006). The institutionalization process takes place at multiple and integrated territorial levels, so that at the outer limit, social networks and normative frameworks are connected on a global scale. In this paper we analyze this process from the particular configurations produced in different (but connected) projects. One project illustrates a territorialized experience of the social construction of a GI. However, this notion is also used as a heuristic category that can represent the constitution of a logic of social action guided by normative principles. According to Boltanski and Chiapello (1999), the project, more than just a network of social actors, is an occasion and a pretext for network formation. Through it, the relevant actors and artifacts that make up the GI system are defined and cooperation among actors who are guided by different interests becomes possible. Networks are structured because of the project and in its service. Its very existence is contingent upon the construction of a system of common values, one that establishes compromises among different normative principles (Thevenot 2001). …