Shaping norms. A convention theoretical examination of alternative food retailers as food sustainability transition actors

Abstract Changing the shared rules and norms underpinning dominant regimes is seen as one driver of sustainability transitions, yet relatively little attention has been paid to exactly how actors seek to change these. In this study, we focus on the norm-shaping work performed by alternative food retailers, a potentially influential alternative food network actor, as a potential element of food system sustainability transitions. We use convention theory as a novel framework for examining this. Convention theory focuses on shared rules and norms in economic coordination and offers a framework for examining how actors negotiate what is right and desirable. By this theory, actors are considered to engage with a plurality of universally accepted notions of worth, organised into different worlds of justification, and to use specific strategies of justification or negotiation to propose and justify different configurations of ideals and their manifestations. The analysis shows how the retailers, by engaging with the different worlds of justification through different strategies of negotiation, promoted four overarching ideals of food production-consumption. Although we must be cautious of overstating the change-making potential of very marginal actors, the view opened by the convention theory perspective is one of active, strategic negotiation taking place in the margins of the dominant food regime, with potentially interesting interactions with the growing landscape pressures to take the food system in a more sustainable direction.