30 November 2026 | 13:00 - 14:00
Véronique De Herde (HEC Liège) will give this seminar, organized by the ELI-A department.
The presentation will be followed by an open discussion.
Food systems are characterized by interdependencies, path dependence, and social-ecological feedback that make transformative sustainability pathways uncertain and context-dependent. As meso-level spaces connecting production, processing, distribution, and consumption, value chains can either enable or constrain stakeholders’ transformative efforts.
But how does value-chain organization actually contribute to sustainability transitions? Transformative initiatives unfold under varying governance, stakeholder interactions, and contextual conditions, while remaining embedded in institutional arrangements and logics inherited from earlier trajectories.
Drawing on social-ecological, institutional, and innovation literature, this presentation introduces a configurational framework of social-ecological system fit in agri-food value-chains, understood as the extent to which value chains support stakeholders’ transformative objectives over time.
The framework approaches social-ecological system fit as an emergent and dynamic property arising from the interplay among governance choices, stakeholder interactions, context, and stakeholders’ ongoing assessment of objective achievement, costs, and distributive justice. It conceptualizes value chains as meso-level configurations through which these dynamics unfold.
The framework is illustrated through a synthesis of observations collected across multiple sustainability-oriented agri-food value-chain developments in the U.S. Midwest, highlighting recurring configurational patterns linking governance, stakeholder interactions, context, and social-ecological system fit.
Positioned as an interpretive and heuristic contribution rather than a predictive model, the framework provides a structured basis for investigating how value-chain configurations support, constrain, and shape stakeholders’ transformative capacity over time.
Beyond its analytical contribution, the framework offers methodological and transdisciplinary applications for empirical inquiry, comparative research, and actionable dialogue among stakeholders engaged in sustainability transitions in agri-food and beyond.
Véronique De Herde is a FNRS Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre d’Économie Sociale, HEC ULiège. She's a former member of the SYTRA team.