Linking Value Chain Partnerships to Entrepreneurial Learning: Implications for Agrifood Systems Resilience

Samenvatting (Engelstalig)

The thesis entitled “Linking Value Chain Partnership to Entrepreneurial Learning: Implications for Agrifood Systems Resilience” explores how value chain partnerships – defined as forms of collaborative institutional arrangements involving private companies, smallholder farmers and other actors in low-income markets – organize to support outcomes of agri-food systems resilience. The findings of the thesis are two-fold: first, smallholder farmer entrepreneurship positively influences outcomes of agri-food systems resilience when it combines effectual and causal behaviours. Second, three governance mechanisms of value chain partnerships (resource pooling, distribution of decision rights and formality of coordination) shape farmers’ effectual and causal behaviours over time. The thesis concludes that developing policies and value chain interventions that support these entrepreneurial behaviours need to be at the core of resilience-building strategies. Accordingly, development efforts need to be directed towards the (re)structuring of governance mechanisms of value chain partnerships whilst accounting for the heterogeneity among participating smallholder farmers.