166 Participatory Processes
deal with things, but not surprisingly that’s how they kill everything off. The Investment and
Development Company for the Northern Netherlands [Noordelijke Ontwikkelings Maat-
schappij] wanted me to do that, but it was impossible of course. That’s how they set up a dicta-
torship, they dictate things, they issue a diktat, but things work the other way round.A second important element was, so I understand from Henk Brouwer’s story, the
introduction of clear rules of the game on the basis of which the required network
(however virtual at first!) could be demarcated and consolidated:
Farmers, processors, and the trade, and the others too, they all had to benefit from it.Hence, the foundation was laid for the actual interlocking of various projects,
which occurred much later.
But more rules were developed:
Sooner or later you’ll have to make it clear that it will continue, with or without the other.Here emerges what I pointed at previously: authority. And related to this: the
moment at which involvement (of the other partners) becomes a choice, whether
or not to actively contribute and devote themselves to the cause.^36
Furthermore, there is a third element, the combination of autonomy and fall-
back position. The most important resources were to a large extent controlled by
the initiators. Here I refer not so much to financial resources (which partly evolved
from the sale of a considerable share of the quotas of their former dairy farms), but
above all to immaterial resources, such as the capability to (in all likelihood) actu-
ally manage the required socio-technical network (to actually supply retailers with
a high-quality and organic product, to actually have retailers commit themselves,
to actually have a number of producers supply organic milk etc.).
Agency, not in an abstract but rather in a concrete sense, reveals itself here as
resource par excellence. In obtaining this agency, the aforementioned start-up phase
(in which a network emerged, expectations were adjusted vis-à-vis one another,
faith emerged) was a sine qua non. Without wanting to go into detail, the availabil-
ity of a fallback position (‘if it had gone wrong, it wouldn’t have been the end of
the world’) was important in the creation of this indispensable precondition.
An organic dairy factory has now been established in Drachten, despite being
initially regarded by various expert systems (the ‘Eindhoven’ office of the
Rabobank,^37 the large dairy companies^38 and the Ministry of Agriculture)^39 as
unthinkable and/or unfeasible. The creation of this factory is exceptional in that it
illustrates the realization of agency in a context characterized by and also control-
led by expert systems that increasingly rule out such agency.
It goes without saying that all this is closely related to the question about the
interrelations between various ordering principles, and to questions about who
and what will create the future, which conditions will have to be met, and what its
legitimacy will be.