Infrastructuring short food supply chains: how intermediaries bind rules, norms and values

Abstract

Food supply chains are crucial for food security and socio-economic development, yet their length concentrates value away from producers and consumers disproportionate resources. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the wars in Ukraine and Iran exposed, overreliance on long chains produces global interdependencies that exacerbate food insecurity. In reaction, alternative agri-food networks (AFNs) and short food supply chains (SFSCs) have proliferated. Addressing gaps in recent reviews, this article asks whether SFSCs organise markets distinctly and, if so, where their transformative potential lies. We argue that this potential lies not in any single market device but in the interaction between two that the literature has treated separately: certification and digitalisation. Drawing on transformative social innovation and the ‘infrastructure’ turn in economic sociology, we propose that certification and digital tools cannot be filed as either rules or norms. Each is a material site in which what actors are allowed to, ought to, and want to do are bundled together; it is the ongoing infrastructuring work of intermediaries that binds these registers and thereby creates value. We examine 156 SFSC initiatives self-described online across the 27 European Union member states. Wherever a certificate appears, it is made actionable through a digital interface: certification no longer travels without digitalisation. We identify two modes through which the devices work as one hybrid infrastructure: transmission, where a digital channel conveys a certification claim; and substitution, where digital transparency and feedback perform the assurance a certificate would otherwise do. These findings reposition intermediaries as the core actors of SFSC markets-in-the-making.