Hétfa (2012): Local producers and producers’ communities – following Elinor Ostrom.

The main aim of our research was to present and analyse how local producers maintain collective reputation of their products, and how institutions of collective governance look like. The theoretical background of the research is based on the Institution Analysis and Development (IAD) framework (Ostrom 2005). A key concept of institutional analysis is governance. According to the IAD framework governance at multiple levels that are nested into each other: the institutions of local communities are defined by national rules as well as local norms, habits, or customs, the basis of collective decisions developed at community level. In our analysis we focus on the institutionalization of collective decisions. We analyse the reputation of products with geographical indicator (GI) as a common-pool resource, and the factors influencing the success or failure of GI initiatives. Two case studies were conducted in two different Hungarian micro-regions: the first case study is about an initiative of wine-producers to define special quality criteria for local wines, while the second case study was conducted among onion-producers, who aim at adopting GI criteria to their products.

Presentation on the research is available here.