ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the ethnographic exploration of the case studies from an everyday governance perspective that we see to be a way of engaging with diverse agri-environmental governance (AEG) governance assemblages across different national contexts. First, it presents the historical development of the three governance instruments that hold the case studies together: the certification scheme and the standard IP-Suisse; a multi-actor network to rejuvenate the soya production in Europe; a top-down instrument for planning land use and environmental issues. Second, it repositions those instruments into wider AEG assemblages, highlighting in the process several key characteristics of these assemblages: a reterritorialisation of the whole Swiss AEG assemblage; the path-dependencies and lock-ins of soya in the European agriculture; and the fragile equilibrium between internal tensions and centralisation forces. Finally, the chapter develops the notion of multiplicity in its diverse dimensions in AEG: multiplicity of the reasons to assemble; multiplicity of imaginaries; and multiplicity as a messy process.
