Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Past, Present and Future 165

In early 1999 I had a long conversation with Henk Brouwer, initiator and cur-
rent director of the FEZ. Looking back he says;

Yes, you do indeed set out with grave uncertainties, and you want to move towards more

certainty. But of course you never achieve this... If I look back, it was mainly faith that grew

in the start-up phase. Faith on both sides and also faith in one’s own abilities, to the extent

that you dare to take risks. You need faith, commitment of all those who will become involved

in such a chain, of farmers, financiers, retailers, the whole lot. This faith will in turn give

you the feedback that you’re on the right track.

Here I want to bring forward a number of elements that played an important role
in the creation of this faith (and therefore in the construction of the FEZ as a new
socio-technical network). I do this especially because these elements are in sharp
contrast with the way in which expert systems usually operate and also because
those same elements sometimes represent a somersault through past, present and
future.
A first element concerns the goals. While expert systems usually arrive at a clear
indication of objectives, to subsequently implement these via standard planning
techniques (which create en passant the required prescriptiveness and verifiability;
cf. Christis, 1985), a completely different approach applied to the creation of the
FEZ:

You have to know which way you want to go, you’ll have to be very clear about it, but other-

wise your more concrete goal is something that emerges slowly as something that you work

towards. Most important is to define the margins, to drive pickets into the ground. Those

margins or boundaries are V-shaped as it were, they take you closer to where you want to be

... Yes, of course it’s true that you adjust your objectives along the way. I wanted much more

at first, and other things too.

In other words, the goal around which the necessary set of partners (the virtual
network) groups itself, is not well defined. In fact, it is precisely the other way
round: an at first loosely organized network is gradually working towards a set of
shared objectives. Partners will drop out, new partners will join. Meanwhile, the
possible goals become more and more sharply defined, hence creating faith on
both sides.
Network and strategy consolidate each other to the same extent. Neither one
is a function of the other. Henk Brouwer is very outspoken about this:

In the beginning you’re swimming against the tide. I have had some problems addressed – for

example, where roughly the break-even point would be. It gives you some idea, and then you can

again determine where the margins are, where the pickets have to go; and thus the end goal

gradually takes more shape [agenda-setting and particularly agenda-building appear as key fac-

tors here]. No, the planning approach with one well-defined goal from the start, from which you

have to reason backwards – it doesn’t work like that. Yes, that’s the way the large organizations