Véronique De Herde
Fulbright Fellow
Values-Based Supply Chain GovernanceMadison, WI 53706
Values-Based Value Chains
Configurational Approaches
Diversity of Value Chain Organizational Models
Food Systems Transformation
Véronique joined the CIAS and the Center for Coops as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar from Belgium.
She focuses on the diversity of value‑chain organizational models that farmers and other stakeholders are redeveloping within agri‑food systems to support differentiated farming practices from a sustainability perspective. She adopts a configurational approach to examine the complex combinations of governance structures, stakeholder interactions, and contextual factors that enable these value-based developments.
By conducting comparative work across the US and Europe, she hopes to draw meaningful lessons from the diverse configurations she observes, offering insights to people involved in such initiatives as they navigate organizational choices, coordination challenges, and decisions around asset integration.
Her background includes interdisciplinary research on the strategic development of agri‑food cooperatives, with several publications addressing the complex challenges of individual and collective agency in transition pathways, as well as work on issues related to comparative organizational data management. She has also contributed to scholarly discussions on research culture and the academic publishing landscape.
She earned her M.A. in Contemporary History from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium), her M.Sc. in Bioengineering, and her Ph.D. in Agronomy from the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). She is currently based at the Center for Social Economy at HEC ULiège (Belgium), where she holds an FNRS postdoctoral fellowship mandate. She is affiliated with the Berlin Institute for Cooperative Studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany) and with the Centre of Expertise for Cooperative Entrepreneurship at KU Leuven (Belgium).
Véronique’s research project is entitled “Amplifying agri-food sustainability pathways: a value chains’ contextual fit perspective”. She aims to:
– identify which combinations of governance structures, stakeholders’ interactions and contextual influences contribute to amplification pathways of differentiated quality in agri-food;
– identify enablers of (agri-food) sustainability amplification in institutional coordination rather than normative steering; and, by this, endorse a non-substantive approach of sustainability amplification outcomes anchored into the stakeholders’ definition of goals and perception of their achievement;
– stress the relevance of approaching sustainability amplification from a meso-level value chain perspective;
– contribute to the comprehension of the impact of context on sustainability amplification and inter-organizational coordination.