Networks an Food System Performance: How do networks contribute to performance of the food & agricultural system in the face of current challenges of high levels of change and uncertainty?

This paper discusses the concept of Food Community Network (FCN) in credence transactions. A FCN could be defined as a governance structure where consumers and producers strongly integrate their functions (goals) by organizing a 'club'. It is based on pooling specific resources and using membership to assign decision and property rights: consumers provide time, information, knowledge and financial resources by participating directly in the organization of production process. They receive leisure, credence foods and decrease the costs of monitoring; producers reduce their decision rights but also part of production and transaction costs, uncertainty of specific investments and income instability. Based on this concept, the study proposes an inductive 'grounded theory' method to explore how FCNs evolve from traditional relationships between producers and consumers and, in turn, under which conditions FCNs can be a competitive governance structure to carry out credence food transactions. Comparing and contrasting examples of embryonic forms of FCNs from North America and Europe provide the instrumental cases for this investigation