Inter-organizational Design for Sustainable Transition in Agri-Food Systems: The Case of the Paris-Saclay Territory

To reach their desirable vision of what actors mean by sustainable agri-food systems, transition processes take place in which the work activities evolve. The present paper investigates such an evolution through the conceptual framework of organizational design in ergonomics. It aims to understand how evolves the work of actors involved in the transition towards more “localized” production, distribution and consumption of food. We propose to consider the sustainability transition of agri-food systems as an inter-organizational design process, a process by which people redesign rules that guide coordination between organizations. We approach local food systems at the territorial scale to grasp the news forms of coordination in their cultural, spatial, economic, technical, political and ecological context. We consider the inter-organizational design process as the meso-level of actions, which articulates with the micro-level (work activities) as well as the macro-level (public policies, norms in food consumption). The paper presents the case of the association C, which manages catering for a public organization on the Paris-Saclay Plateau. We investigate the ecosystem of actors of the association C, as well as the way by which the catering manager develops and redesigns coordination at the various levels of actions.