438 Localized Food Systems
Alternative supply chains and rural development activities are, it seems, built
upon new sets of associations and associational capacities of actors to engage in
ways which shape both the social and the natural. Associational interfaces (often as
emerging and contingent networks and chains) are both informal and highly sig-
nificant in establishing trust, common understandings, working patterns, and
forms of cooperation and co-optation between different actors in the supply chain.
These differ from institutional interfaces which include state regulations and the
support and services offered by rural economic development agencies (see Long,
2000). And, they are often crucial in generating and facilitating supply chain inter-
faces at a regional level – a key new spatial platform for the development of agro-
food alternatives to take hold (see Renting et al, 2003). However, such interfaces
are vulnerable to internal and externally generated disruptions. There is no inevi-
tability that strong and mutually reinforcing associational interfaces will be repro-
duced over time. Furthermore, where they do not exist, or have broken down, it
may take many years to rebuild relationships and working trust relationships to a
point where regional or local actors – or actors acting at a distance across a supply
chain – can create the conditions necessary to effectively and efficiently meet and
relate to consumer demands. In many cases, in what we term ‘short supply chains’,
these new associational competences are formed across the traditionally recognized
producer/consumer arena. Indeed, reconnecting associational capacity across this
former divide is part of the new sets of innovations that mark out the new mod-
ernization projects from the old. Evidence from European case studies suggests
that sustaining rural development through the evolution of reconfigured supply
chains must be based upon new combinations of both institutional support and
associational development. Furthermore, these relationships must be able to adapt
to internal and external shocks and pressures over time and space. Here, and again
distinctively, there is no one model. A key question then is the degree to which
these features will need to become more widespread if real aggregated rural devel-
opment impacts are to be achieved, and how, if they are not apparent, can they be
generated?
In the non-productive sphere of residential forest communities in South Wales,
we also see how deep-seated local interpretations and impressions of community,
and particularly of the marginalization effects of the State as part of community
life, have a critical bearing upon the constructions and shapes of socio-natural rela-
tions and practices in that community (see also Rannikko, 1999). In short, the
social character and construction of the community – in this case a socially rich
place, but marginalized and peripheralized by the State – provides an important
social prism through which nature is perceived and used. Hence socio-natural per-
ceptions and practices emerge as an expression of the social construction of the
community and, in this case, the particular incision of the state in this construction.
In this sense what we can infer from this is that particular types or sets of socio-nat-
ural relations and practices cannot be simply ‘read-off ’ from the prevailing sets of
‘(realist)’ social and economic regulatory conditions. Neither, however, as social con-
structionists may propose, can they just be rendered as varyingly ‘co-constructed’