**4. What difference does it make which governance model a community or organization adopts to coordinate the production of goods and services?**

What difference does it make which governance model a community or organization adopts to coordinate the production of goods and services? Many scholars of organizational theory believe that the particular form of governance process adopted by a particular entity affects their ability to adapt to changes in the environment in which they operate—their task environment. Organizational theorists believe that organizations that adopt the perspective of governance as coordination and controlthe bureaucratic regulatory model—are inflexible and unresponsive to their task environment. Bureaucratic organizations lack the participative culture that nurtures freedom, transparency, commitment, creativity and continuous learning among members. These latter qualities are indispensable for promoting participation, innovation and responsiveness in addressing complex diverse issues and the varied perspectives of an increasingly heterogeneous stakeholder—these are key capabilities for survival in a continually changing, complex and turbulent environment. An

environment that requires increasing integration with the ecological sustenance base in order to achieve sustainability. Consequently, these qualities determine the capacity of the organization or the community to adapt to its ever changing environment.

Under a bureaucratic type of governance, decisions are always made by management at a level above where the work is actually done. Thinking and doing are seen as separate tasks carried out by different individuals. Decision making is centralized and autonomy and freedom to be creative are curtailed. Here, the task of governance is discharged by a privileged few on behalf of the organization. Such organizations are tightly integrated and emphasize control to maintain order and protect the organization from external threats that would disrupt established structures and ways of doing things. The stability of these organizations depends on the extent to which they can be insulated from disrupting forces. These organizations operate as closed systems which react to change by attempting to manage or transform the environment in an adversarial or competitive manner rather than responding to the environment in a proactive manner [29].

Globalization, the proliferation of communication possibilities, continual technological change, the easy movement of technology and capital across countries, and the need to reorder our relationship with the sustenance base (the ecological realignment of our industrial, economic and social institutions) create unprecedented complexity and dynamism that require organizations to continually adjust and adopt. To increase the odds of survival, an organization must become more participative, i.e., decision-making is decentralized; freedom, autonomy, trust, transparency and continual learning and creativity are nurtured. In this context, participative organization processes-freedom, autonomy, openness, learning and innovation-create the flexibility the organization needs to become an adaptive and open system as opposed to being closed and rigid. As an open system, participative organizations develop a symbiotic relationship with the environment—influencing the environment and being influenced by it. The interface of the participative organization and the environment becomes the "focal point" of activity where the purpose and mission of the organization achieve meaning [29]. In this sense then, an organization achieves meaning when it responds adaptively to the needs existing in the environment, which includes not only the need for products but also for quality service, non-invasive, unsustainable use of resources, collaborative partnering with stakeholders and the participation of stakeholders in charting the course of the organization as wells as steering the organization on course. The central role of governance is to define purpose and chart a course for achieving the defined purpose. However, achieving purpose in a turbulent and dynamic environment is a function of adaptive capacity, and since adaptive capacity is a function of participative processes, then, the role of governance in a dynamic environment is to create conditions under which participative processes can take root and flourish. Trust, freedom, autonomy, creativity, and openness are the touchstones of participative governance. These principles enable organizations such as CBOs and communities to deal effectively with complexity and change because each member is vested in the participatory process, which nurtures commitment to working to develop solutions to problems.

As discussed in [9, 10], our ancestral tendencies can thwart our ability to advance sustainable practices. Moreover, in many cases the strategies we pursue are ones that do not match these tendencies—in that they do not take into account our natural tendency to promote and prioritize our own self-interests above that of the group or common good. They recommend strategies that take advantage of these natural tendencies (which resemble our ancestral mode of behavior) such as creating small dense interdependent social networks and foster group identities. CBOs provide a platform to facilitate the implementation of these strategies that promote sustainable behavior.

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*Accounting for the Impact of Sustainable Agriculture: The Role of Community Based…*

In this section, our objective is to answer the question: What is the level of support among CBOs in the southeastern black belt states (BBS) for sustainable agricultural practices? To answer this question, we conducted a telephone survey of community action agencies (CAAs) located in eleven Black Belt States in the southeastern U.S. Namely, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. BBS was defined as a state with an African American population that is equal to or greater than 12% of the population of the state. Following [34], we defined community-based organizations as nonprofit civic entities that are locally controlled; and whose mission is to serve a particular constituency that is tied to a defined locality. These entities comprise groups of people who interact directly, frequently and in multi-faceted ways to deliver service to their constituency [34]. We chose to use CAAs as our population of CBOs because they have a long operational history as a group, and they were specifically established by federal mandate to address poverty, by engaging the community in the problem solving process. Additionally, an easily accessible data base was available, and they fit neatly the profile of CBOs as defined in this chapter. The sample frame for CAAs was obtained from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Web site. We retrieved lists of CAAs for the BBS listed above and combined them into a single master roster containing 315 CAAs. Since the population size is a relatively small one, and all the CAAs on our list were accessible, we decided to do a

census instead of drawing a random sample from this small sample frame.

Respondents to our interview were CAA leaders. Based on our discussion above on the practice of sustainable agricultural production system at the community

1.In your opinion, how important is it for more farmers to use organic methods for producing food? As we have explained previously, sustainable agricultural production is practiced at the community level via CSAs or community-based agriculture. Drawing on the literature, [35] defined a CSA as community-based organizations of consumers and producers. This collective of producers and consumers focus on using organic and sustainable methods to produce their

2.We also asked respondents to use a five-point scale anchored with "strongly agree" through "strongly disagree" to indicate the extent of their agreement with the following statements: Part of the duty of a good citizen is to buy locally grown farm produce. Vibrant community-based farming is more likely to keep family farmers on the land than large corporate farming (factory farming, large plantation). Community-based farming is more likely to do a better job of preserving the quality of the land than large corporate farming. Small farms are better for the environment than large corporate farms. These questions are based on the rationale presented above, in addition to the following considerations: A persistent critique of corporate commodity agriculture is that it has depleted the natural resource base and degraded the environment from which it draws its support [2, 14]. The advent and growth of civic agriculture or community-based agriculture systems is seen as a response to

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84385*

**5. Material and methods**

**5.1 Population and sample**

**5.2 Instrumentation**

products.

level, we asked the following questions:

*Accounting for the Impact of Sustainable Agriculture: The Role of Community Based… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84385*
