ABSTRACT
Increasingly practitioners, planners, funders, and policymakers recognize the importance of “soft” or “social” infrastructure, in the form of relationships, trust, norms, and knowledge to support the development of regional food systems and economies. Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations and public agencies have piloted initiatives to provide resources and training to support activities associated with value chain coordination (VCC) in various entrepreneurial sectors and industries, particularly agriculture and food. The strategy of VCC includes various roles such as market matchmaking, convening stakeholders, providing technical assistance, research support, and fostering innovative ideas to support individuals and businesses who produce, process, and market products along the value chain. Whereas prior research has detailed the roles, skills, activities, and capacities of individual coordinators, there is a gap regarding how individual VCC professionals can work together in shared spaces, such as geographic regions, market channels, or product focus. In this chapter, we share a case study of an innovation in developing “soft” or social infrastructure through developing a novel coordinating structure—a regional Value Chain Coordination Network (VCCN)—that fosters more cohesive local and regional food chains and creates linkages between urban and rural communities and economies. Members of the Indiana VCCN are comprised of food systems practitioners who fulfill one or more of the roles of VCC and who share the common goal of increasing new market opportunities, trainings, and resources to food producers and food businesses along agri-food value chains in the state. We discuss implications of how the Indiana VCCN provides opportunity for coordination of multiple regions within the state, and how individual coordinators are building diverse forms of soft infrastructure through relationship development, education, and new urban-rural linkages through production, processing, and market opportunities. As rural communities are often less resourced in physical, financial, and political capital than their urban counterparts, the focus on building soft infrastructure is a critical “gateway” strategy for developing and strengthening agri-food markets in rural places. This chapter offers on-the-ground insights from conception through the first two years of implementing the Indiana VCCN, which was made possible through grant support from a USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Local Foods Promotion Program award. This chapter concludes with examples and considerations for future development of VCCNs as a place-based development strategy that could be applied to other regions and sectors beyond food and agriculture.
