The design of networks in their institutional and organizational aspects is a key determinant of their competitiveness. Consequently managers in agricultural and food industries have to address the question of governance design, i. e. of choices concerning the content and the architecture of...

In agricultural subsectors, collective organizations such as producer groups or second-degree cooperatives frequently cope with management of brand names. The success of these brand names depends upon the ability of actors to collectively create, guarantee and sustain a stream of rents based...

Vulnerability–resilience indexes fail to grasp all dimensions of sustainability, whereas sustainable development has gained momentum. We fill this gap with a hierarchical multimetric composite index (Net Vulnerability Resilience Index: NVRI) whose robustness relies on a mathematical algorithm...

Since the publication of path-breaking contributions on the governance of environmental resources in the early 1990s many political initiatives have been taken, many governance experiments have been run, and a large multidisciplinary field of research has opened up. The aim of this...

Chemical industry's managers have developed since mid-1970' a management and prevention risk policy named “Responsible Care”. This policy was a first draft for a sustainable management even if these two concepts were not exactly synonymous. Through genealogy of this practice and its use in a...

This article provides a critical appraisal of the concept of sustainable development in light of climate change. As the latest climate change science indicates strong effects of anthropogenic activity on global warming, we review the pros and the cons of prioritizing development over...

Chemical industry's managers have developed since mid-1970' a management and prevention risk policy named “Responsible Care”. This policy was a first draft for a sustainable management even if these two concepts were not exactly synonymous. Through genealogy of this practice and its use in a...

This chapter develops an analytic framework for understanding how the economic theory of contracts applies to multi-level governance and what these theories suggest with respect to the selection of a contractual approach. It begins with an overview of the relevant theories, presents an analytic...