Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic insights into an alternative food network, this paper draws attention to the re-appropriation of accountability practices for counterhegemonic agendas. It assesses the potential of a market-oriented global form to help undermine the very norms and logics of the market economy.

Paper long abstract:

Practices of audit culture are ubiquitous in the field of agri-food production and trade. However, as in any other domain of human activities, their effects are far from being always predictable or totalizing (Shore & Wright 2015).

This paper draws on ethnographic insights into an alternative food production and trade network (AFN) in Germany to show how accountability practices can be re-appropriated for resisting one of the most powerful and harmful imperatives that order contemporary economic activities: growth. Paradoxically, decoupling from this pathway and breaking the rules of the market economy was realized by means of voluntary standards, formalized self-obligations, extensive indicator-guided monitoring and reporting schemes. The AFN mobilized these practices and tools for consistently shielding itself from utilitarian values and economies of scale. Throughout work routines, market norms and relations were meticulously excluded, whereas ostensible ecological and social externalities were made present and explicitly included in practices of evaluating, rating and pricing. At the same time, rendering the production and trade activities of the network ‘auditable’ (Power 1996) allowed it to sustain its market agency through certificates and product labels. Hence, both its members decided opposition to the workings of the market economy and their market success remained uncompromised.

I use this indicative case and the ambiguities it reveals to raise broader questions with regard to the potential of accountability practices to subvert the hegemonic norms and structures that have engendered them in the first place.