162 Participatory Processes
Agency is crucial in the development and realization of projects. In this context, I
understand agency to be the capability to create the required interrelations with
other projects. In other words, the capability to recognize, to utilize, to bridge or
to reconceptualize discontinuities as essential demarcations. Insight into the inter-
action between intended plans, the interaction between presupposed positions,
actions, reactions, outcomes, benefits, costs and their allocation is decisive in this.
Therefore, agency is the capability to create virtual congruence:^34 congruence
that does not yet exist (or is not yet necessary), but which is decisive for the future
of the projects under discussion. To create future congruence, coordination in the
here and now becomes decisive: the required congruence is achieved by way of
coordinating various development projects vis-à-vis each other. Failure to do so
results in incongruence. Fragility is therefore a term that should be part of any
analysis of social developments, because the effective construction of congruence
and coherence is probably the exception in real life. In view of the many possible
discontinuities, risks and incapabilities, failure seems to be more likely than suc-
cess. This applies more strongly when it concerns innovations and the more so
when it concerns deviations from the institutionalized patterns and regularities.
The search for and extension of such ‘deviations’, however necessary when estab-
lished patterns go wrong, is and remains particularly fragile.
An Example
In the autumn of 1998 the Friese Ecologische Zuivelfabriek (FEZ, Frisian Organic
Dairy Products) was opened in Drachten. However, the real, the essential, innova-
tion is not the building and inauguration of this factory, but the preceding
re arrangement of projects vis-à-vis one another. Numerous projects were at issue
here: those of the many organic dairy farmers (about 80 in Friesland at the time)
who at the time had to have their milk processed beyond the provincial borders;
furthermore there was the, shall we say, potential project of an unknown number
of dairy farmers considering a changeover to organic production, but confronted
by a series of questions. These questions all related to the future actions of others.
They raised many uncertainties: will consumer demand grow sufficiently to sup-
port the higher supply levels and maintain higher prices? Will the cost increases
related to producing organically exceed the benefits? Will the profits of the organic
circuit become increasingly extracted by those controlling large-scale processing
(that is, the owners of the new organic dairy factory)? Is it possible, if the intended
project (the changeover to organic dairy production) appears set to fail, to fall back
on the existing patterns (specifically: will it be possible to rejoin Friesland Coberco
Dairy Foods, the largest and, by now, sole processor of milk in the north of the
country?).
The initiators (who intended to build the FEZ) also had an almost infinite
series of questions, which again were related to the future actions of others. Will