Private Food Standards and trade in the Vietnamese dragonfruit sector
Creators: name: Freckleton, Rebeka
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2022

description: Focussed on the intersection of transnational private regulation, international horticulture value chains, this research seeks to understand why support provided by various actors for functional upgrading (upgrading whereby producers or groups of producers develop capacity in higher-value production techniques to capture more of the product's value) within value chains works in some contexts, yet not in others. This study was stimulated by the observation that significant effort is expended by various supply chain actors to help horticulture producers in the Global South upgrade their practices to meet the requirements of transnational private regulation, as a means to improve livelihood outcomes for farmers in the Global South. This was typically, but not exclusively, augmented by support from the relevant local and national governments and the private sector. Despite the magnitude of this support, the outcomes of functional upgrading projects are highly variable. While some of these projects have been successful in supporting horticulture producers to meet certification requirements, which usually leads to improved market outcomes for the farmers involved others have been criticised for delivering perverse outcomes to wealthy farmers, rather than directing supporting those who most need it. I argue that a key theory adopted to understand supply chains, global value chain analysis, should be enriched in its institutional component to understand the role institutions play in mediating and structuring supply chains which in turn, may guide a deeper understanding of the variation in project outcomes. I combine modes of analysis from sociological and historical institutionalism, which I then use to augment the institutional component of global value chain theory, and apply this to a case study of functional upgrading projects in Binh Thuan, south-central Viet Nam. By applying a novel conceptualisation of institutions to a global value chain study, the research findings show that farmers' decisions around functional upgrading are complex and rooted in their history, culture, social norms and values and, consequently, expectations about their own and other's behaviour. In doing so, I demonstrate that ensuring to undertake an analysis of these layers of complexity, and consideration of how these can and do impact the decisions made by farmers, could lead to more efficacious targeting of support for farmers, if meeting the requirements of transnational private regulation continues to be considered a mechanism for improving the livelihoods of farmers in the Global South. This thesis addresses two gaps in the current knowledge. First, this thesis responds to calls to combine different institutional analyses to develop more comprehensive institutional frameworks to demonstrate that global supply chains are affected by institutionally mediated incentives and constraints. This approach is applied for the first time, to the best of my knowledge, to dragon fruit supply chains in Viet Nam. Second, by combining sociological and historical institutionalism, and employing this for analysis against a backdrop of the institutional dimension of global value chains, this thesis contributes new knowledge to global value chain studies. Furthermore, on a practical level, this research adds to a burgeoning body of literature that suggests that, for development projects to have the best chance of success, they must be carefully tailored to the specific context, taking into consideration local particularities.