What scales when alternatives scale: feedback dynamics in community-supported agriculture (CSA) in Germany

Thursday, July 16, 2026, 8:00 PM

Session: SOC Poster Session (Virtual 2) (Virtual)

Community-based initiative (CBI) movements such as community-supported agriculture (CSA) are increasingly recognized as alternatives to dominant institutional arrangements, yet they face a key scaling problem. Specifically, initiatives that succeed often struggle to expand without compromising what made them distinctive. What is missing across existing literatures is a feedback-dynamic account of how scaling outcomes are actually produced. This paper investigates the feedback dynamics of scaling in CBI movements through a paired Gioia–qualitative system dynamics analysis of community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement in Germany, a translocal field of approximately 500 initiatives. Twelve semi-structured interviews informed a model of 32 factors, 55 directed connections, and 46 detected loops organized across three subsystems (organizational capacity, member space, movement infrastructure). Three findings emerge. First, retention dynamics drive scaling where roughly half of detected loops route through member departure, with growth-pursuing initiatives without retention infrastructure failing through a depletion-departure cascade. Second, cross-subsystem leverage points (community management, food partnerships) require sustained local development because they depend on situated judgment that resists clean codification. Third, intermediaries function as carriers of the slow stabilizing loops that unit-level actors cannot sustain, doing translation work that allows locally developed practice to travel.