| Sustainability standards are being increasingly deployed and mainstreamed throughout the coffee sector as an innovative way to address the concerns of consumers who seek coffees that not only have exceptional tastes, but are seen as beneficial to the environment and the lives of those who grow it. This dissertation analyzes how these practices are being instantiated, in both canonical and novel ways, in the U.S.-Nicaragua coffee trade as it is an early site of development of many of these initiatives later implemented in other parts of the world. Coffee has great significance in terms of the number of persons involved in its production and circulation and the economic impact on their lives. Problematized through this ethnographic project, it has additional value as a case of new accounting practices and market-based approaches to development and sustainability challenges characteristic of neoliberal governance.The animating research question of the dissertation is: How are different approaches to managing the coffee sector in order to serve various goals (e.g., reduction of poverty, environmental sustainability, establishing proper business practices) being enacted, with what consequences? I examine this question through ethnographic data gathered among farmers, roasters and buyers in the specialty coffee industry, and nongovernmental organizations and development agents involved in quality improvement and sustainability certification programs. Methods include participant observation in Central America with farmers, cooperatives, and other producers' organizations and in the U.S. and Central America in trainings, trade exhibits, and competitions for the specialty coffee industry. I conducted and analyzed semi-structured interviews of a wide array of actors. Finally, I analyzed print and online documentation on quality, certification practices and concerns in the sector.Analyzing the circulation of knowledge in quality improvement programs and sustainability certifications, I find that "quality" is taken up by the specialty coffee sector in ways that do not necessarily involve improvement for the lives of most producers, who are not able to negotiate the terms of their participation in the specialty coffee trade. However, just as I complicate the notion that coffee travels from tree to cup in a straightforward, linear, power-neutral fashion, I demonstrate that quality categorizations and sustainability certification systems are multiply instantiated, not the unidirectional imposition of a global system that is locally imposed. There is a constant tension between global standardization and situated, immediate interpretation. In particular, I find farmers in Nicaragua using international sustainability certifications for specifically local purposes, demonstrating that sustainability is a malleable category that is being co-produced. |
