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18 - The Growth in International Audit Culture: Achieving Agricultural Sustainability Inside a World of Measures?

from Part IV - Politics, Power, State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

By
Hugh Campbell
Edited by
Katharine Legun ,
Julie C. Keller ,
Michael Carolan  and
Michael M. Bell
Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

Over the last three decades, the emergence of ‘audit culture’ providing assurance about the qualities of consumer products has become a ubiquitous element of economic worlds. In the pursuit of greater sustainability, audit systems provide a particular kind of solution to questions of environmental sustainability in the sourcing of a wide range of consumer products. In doing so, audit culture has the potential to reduce our individual actions and responses to environmental concerns from ontologies of ‘environmental citizenship’ to the more truncated ontology of ‘environmental consumerism’. This chapter examines this pivotal shift towards audit culture, and its treatment by sociologists, around three questions: 1) What is ‘audit culture’ and how has it been associated with the rise of neoliberalism in economic worlds? 2) How do audits work to empower and disempower participants in economic worlds? 3) How do audits, as technologies with intriguing powers, act to shape outcomes and perform in unexpected ways? These three questions are explored in an examination of the rise of environmental auditing in agrifood chains that have been introduced to service a rising demand for ‘sustainable’ products for Developed World consumers.

Keywords

Audit CultureNeoliberalismAgrifood ChainsSustainable AgricultureEnvironmental Consumerism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology , pp. 301 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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