Le label AB, dispositif de promesse ou de jugement ?

Abstract

Organic farmers strongly disagree about the "good" use of the organic label. Two opposite interpretations arise from this debate. The first aims towards increasing and explicit organic quality in order to better control its conformity. The second, on the other hand, insists on the impasse this way of objectivising organic farming leads to. It refuses to reduce organic farming to "a thing" and prefers to understand it as the plural result of a varied range of implementations of a "philosophy" within the frame of a critical collective discussion. The opposition between these two views seems to be better grasped in the distinction L. Karpik makes between systems of promise and systems of judgment, notions he developed whilst analysing the credibility of quality signals, rather than by economic or social power relationships. Systems of promise and of judgment differentiate two formally opposite worlds, a pre-established context of action on one side, and the global result of the continued reflexive analysis of experience on the other. Yet the long-lasting controversy amongst organic farmers shows that they are in fact not antinomic. On the contrary, the certification success and its durability seem to result from the interactions between the two regimes of action deriving from these two interpretations. Therefore, one should not attempt to end the controversy for the sake of good organic farming governance but on the contrary foster interactions between the two. © 2013 NSS-Dialogues, EDP Sciences.