Overview
Michael Santhanam-Martin’s doctoral research investigated governance arrangements and practices in the Victorian dairy industry, and how they account for the sustainability of farming communities.
Project Summary
This research aimed to identify how agricultural industry governance can better support rural community sustainability, understood as having social, economic, environmental and equity dimensions. It adopt a conceptual framing of industry governance as a process of collective action involving actors and activity in three spheres: place, industry and state, and used actor-network theory (ANT) to trace how industry governance activity arises from associations between human and non-human actors. This theoretical choice sought to make research a practice that reveals opportunities for things to be different, rather than one that adds weight to existing explanations of why things are as they are.
The research design consisted of a single case study in the dairy industry in north-east Victoria, Australia. It included examination of the social and material practices revealed in a regional-scale industry development project – the Alpine Valleys Dairy Pathways (AVDP) project. Data generated include seventy interviews with dairy farmers, other community members and governance actors, three years of participant observations of the AVDP project and content analysis of relevant documents including news media.
A key finding was that the dairy industry, through the industry ‘sustainability’ agenda, is engaging with citizens' and customers' demands for improved environmental management and animal welfare. However, industry governance continues to shape change toward larger, more intensive and more highly-capitalised farms. There is a current focus on promoting more diverse farm business models (or organisation forms), potentially involving separation of land ownership, farm business ownership, and farm management responsibility. Industry and government actors are not examining the potential implications of such changes for rural communities.
Governing agriculture for community sustainability requires governance actors representing the interests of communities to be included in industry development planning and action, and to be prepared to question the assumed benefits of 'growth', in the light of the range of processes that communities identify as contributing to their sustainability. This change in governing practices could result in changed emphases within industries' practice change interventions, to shape growth in accordance with communities' collective interests.
Project Duration
March 2011 – May 2015
Research Group Leader/Key contact
Michael Santhanam-Martin
Contact details
Michael Santhanam-Martin
mpmartin@unimelb.edu.au
Partnership details
The University of Melbourne scholarship
Resources/Links
http://hdl.handle.net/11343/56321
Publications
Santhanam-Martin, M., Ayre, M., & Nettle, R. (2015). Community sustainability and agricultural landscape change: insights into the durability and vulnerability of the productivist regime. Sustainability Science, 10(2), 207-217. doi: 10.1007/s11625-014-0268-2