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Tim Gieseke

Sustainability Governance Disrupts by Unifying

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Sustainability Governance Disrupts by Unifying

It has been said that agriculture sustainability is not rocket science - it is a lot harder. And it's true - rockets can be built by a team of scientists and engineers, and those same types of experts cannot build ag sustainability; it is far more complex.

Many agree. Kara Hurst, former CEO of The Sustainability Consortium, said for sustainability to reach the next plateau, the system must experience some disruptive innovation. She had few specifics but recognized something, some catalyst, some underlying principle was missing for this movement to become real.

Few projects mentioned a governance strategy and of those, none contained a coherent governance strategy or approach.

From an agricultural producer's perspective, the real sustainability movement looks like the landscape photo above; multiple stakeholders demanding sustainability values from unique and disparate strategies. Different accounting methods, different values, and different governance strategies. While both the sustainability accounting and valuation strategies are consciously and diligently developed by experts - the governance strategies kind of just happen.

I can empathize. Governance is an awkward term, with many meanings and it somewhat just emerges from the culture of the organizations. Peter Drucker summed up the challenge of changing organizational governance with his “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. So, ignoring governance becomes a strategy.

Developing a governance strategy is tricky, because like most things cultural, it is often invisible to those in it. People accept cultural norms as universal norms, until they are able to travel to other cultural universes. As I traveled through agriculture, science, policy, research, government, NGO, corporations and politics sectors, my version of the standard model of governance began to change. Governance just doesn't happen, it has some fundamental components that can be examined and managed.

At first I examined a dozen or so case studies for the three organizational governance styles used; hierarchy, market or network governance styles. I found what many others realized, these governance styles generate inherent conflicts in agriculture sustainability, even when they have the same objectives. For a deeper understanding, I theorized four aspects of governance; public, private, policy-maker and practitioner and then split the governance actors into the four sectors: Public Policy-Maker, Private Policy-Maker, Public Practitioner and Private Practitioners.

When I reassessed the case studies with this method, it revealed a different type of physics. The more successful organizations incorporated different mixes of governance styles at the sub-project level by relying on different sector actors. These mixes caused internal and external shifts in governance in many of the cases, and most of these decision to mix governance were actually made unconsciously.

With this new lens I made several rapid assessments of local, state, regional and national ag sustainability efforts - public, quasi-public and private. Few mentioned a governance strategy and of those, none contained a coherent governance strategy or approach.

Ironically, the disruptive innovation needed for agriculture sustainability is a more unifying theory of governance to organize, not disrupt the current efforts.

Food and agriculture sustainability is one of the fastest growing economic and social issues today, despite the common sense among many of its participants that something is truly missing for it to become real.

In this evolving space, nothing could be more empowering to your organization than to understand governance from this new perspective. To be able to review a proposal and understand why, from a governance perspective, if it will wither or take root.

Tim Gieseke wrote EcoCommerce 101: adding an ecological dimension to the economy (2011) to describe an environmental market signal. After several real world applications he concluded that to carry this unique market signal it required a more unified approach. He recently completed Negotiating Sustainability: the role of shared governance in sustaining landscapes, a Taylor & Francis manuscript to be published in 2016.

In 2016, he is available to assist public, quasi-public and private organizations to become the pioneering entities in exploring this very real and emerging world of sustainability governance. Governance is a topic whose time has come.

Tim Gieseke Written by Tim GiesekeFollowing

Ben Cloud Ben Cloud 2nd President & CEO at Phyco BioSciences, Inc. I don't understand why the USDA definition of Sustainable Agriculture (1991 Farm Bill) is not better understood and utilized? LikeReply(1)2 days ago Tim Gieseke Tim Gieseke AUTHOR 1st President, Ag Resource Strategies, LLC Ben - do you mean understood and utilized by USDA, producers, others, or all? Like2 days ago