The Limits of Information: Coordinating Multiple Time Horizons in Sustainable Agricultural Value Chains

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural value chains are increasingly governed through information infrastructures, such as traceability systems, certification schemes, auditing protocols, and verification mechanisms. This paper, however, argues that information and temporal coordination are distinct governance capacities. Drawing on a comparative interpretive analysis of twenty-seven sustainability-oriented agricultural value chain initiatives, supported by an iterative inductive–deductive coding matrix and cross-case synthesis, the paper examines how sustainability is rendered governable across public programs, corporate strategies, international development projects, supranational policy frameworks, and multi-stakeholder initiatives. It shows that contemporary initiatives consistently frame sustainability as a coordination problem and rely heavily on instruments that generate visibility and verification. Yet comparatively few mechanisms are devoted to sustaining alignment across the extended time horizons through which many sustainability outcomes emerge. The comparative analysis identifies a governance asymmetry in the document collection: it devotes extensive attention to mechanisms for making sustainability visible, while comparatively fewer mechanisms address the obligations, risks, rewards, and expectations of actors that unfold across ecological, institutional, financial, market, and livelihood timelines. The paper contributes to value chain governance and sustainability scholarship by conceptualizing sustainable agricultural value chains as systems that must address temporal coordination and by arguing that durable and resilient sustainability transitions require not only better information but also institutional capacities to coordinate across multiple time horizons.