Sustaining What? From Corporate Sustainability to Agri-Food Transformation Through Commonist Value Theory

Abstract

Corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems have expanded dramatically, yet emissions, deforestation, hunger, and land concentration intensify. Why does corporate sustainability systematically fail to deliver transformation? This paper applies Commonist Value Theory (CVT) to show that this failure is structural, not contingent. CVT distinguishes between True Value, the life-supporting qualities that sustain human and more-than-human flourishing, and Fetish Value, abstracted forms oriented toward capital accumulation. CVT traces how corporate sustainability programs convert the former into the latter through ‘decommonization’: the perversion and enclosure of shared life-supporting relations. Drawing on investor analyses, carbon market assessments, and critical scholarship, this paper demonstrates that corporate sustainability programs function as civilizing meta-mechanisms. Rather than transforming food systems, they stabilize existing arrangements by absorbing critique and redirecting transformative energies into regime-compatible forms. Farmers’ knowledge is captured as proprietary data, living ecosystems are reduced to tradeable metrics, collaborative relationships are fragmented by corporate platforms, and movements for genuine alternatives are channeled into supply chain optimization. The analysis concludes that corporate sustainability cannot deliver genuine transformation because its structural function is to stabilize rather than supersede the current value regime. Genuine transformation requires commons-based alternatives from below and political–legislative shifts from above that structurally constrain decommonization.

1. Introduction

Corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems have expanded dramatically over the past two decades. Major food and agricultural corporations now routinely announce multi-billion-dollar commitments to regenerative agriculture, sustainable sourcing, carbon neutrality, and climate-smart practices. Nestlé, for example, has pledged CHF 1.2 billion for regenerative agriculture as part of a wider CHF 3.2 billion climate investment [1,2], while Unilever has established a €1 billion Climate & Nature Fund [3,4]. PepsiCo’s ‘Positive Agriculture’ program aims to scale regenerative practices across 7 million acres by 2030 [5].

In parallel, digital farming platforms such as Bayer’s Climate FieldView, John Deere’s Operations Center, and Microsoft’s Azure FarmBeats promote data-driven ‘smart’ agriculture that promises to optimize production while reducing environmental footprints [6,7,8,9]. All of this unfolds within a global food and grocery market valued at around USD 12.8–13.2 trillion in 2025 and projected to exceed USD 17 trillion by the mid-2030s [10], where sustainability is increasingly framed as both a competitive advantage and operational imperative.

Yet core indicators show that the fundamental drivers of socio-ecological crisis in food systems continue to intensify. Agri-food system emissions reached about 16.5 Gt CO₂-equivalent per year (roughly 31% of global anthropogenic emissions), increasing by 17% between 1990 and 2019, with further growth driven by pre- and post-production processes [11,12]. Between 2001 and 2022, crop and cattle production accounted for approximately 86% of global deforestation [13], while in tropical regions, 90–99% of forest loss between 2011 and 2015 was agriculture-driven [14]. Land concentration has accelerated: the largest 1% of farms now operate more than 70% of the world’s farmland, whereas around 84% of farms (those under two hectares) control only about 12% of agricultural land [15], cited in [16,17,18].

In 2024, an estimated 638–720 million people, or 7.8–8.8% of the global population, faced hunger, and about 2.6 billion people could not afford a healthy diet [19]. The hidden costs of current food systems (including health impacts, environmental degradation, and social harms) are estimated at roughly USD 19.8 trillion annually, more than double the approximately USD 9 trillion value of global food consumption at market prices [20,21].

Taken together, these trends point to a striking paradox: corporate sustainability initiatives and ‘green’ investments are expanding, yet the structural drivers of crisis, such as emissions, deforestation, land concentration, hunger, and hidden costs, continue to worsen. How can we explain this persistent paradox, and what does it reveal about the ways corporate sustainability programs reorganize, appropriate, or even erode the very life-supporting relations and commons on which any meaningful understanding of sustainability must rest?

This paper argues that these patterns are not contingent failures but structurally produced outcomes. As the following section shows, existing critical explanations capture important dimensions of this paradox, but each exhibits characteristic limitations that prevent a fully integrated account. This paper applies Commonist Value Theory (CVT), a new integrative value–theoretic framework originated in the author’s prior work [22,23,24,25], formalized in Hosseini and Gills [26], and further developed in Hosseini [27,28,29] to demonstrate how and why corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems structurally reproduce the very crises they claim to address.

1.1. The Limits of the Major Critical Explanations of the Paradox

Substantial critical research has emerged to explain this paradox, yet each strand exhibits characteristic limitations.

Greenwashing critiques document the gap between corporate sustainability rhetoric and operational reality. This literature exposes misleading environmental claims, the decoupling of sustainability reporting from actual practice, and the tendency for voluntary initiatives to privilege reputation management over substantive change [30,31,32]. A significant portion of greenwashing literature in agriculture treats the issue as a strategic choice involving ‘bad faith’ or ‘deception.’ These studies often use frameworks like the “Six Sins of Greenwashing” to categorize corporate behavior as intentional ‘fibbing’ or ‘vagueness’ to capture market premiums [33,34,35]. Because these analyses frame the problem as a deliberate lie, they are theoretically less equipped to explain failures where the company is following best practices or making genuine investments [36].

Scale critiques argue that corporate sustainability investment, while growing, remains fundamentally inadequate [37,38]. The gap between regenerative rhetoric and substantive commitment is stark [39]. Yet ‘too little, too slow’ critiques fail to explain the structural barriers to scaling or why corporate sustainability investment remains systematically misallocated despite the crisis.

More sophisticated analyses identify systemic barriers that produce failures even when corporate intentions are genuine [40,41,42,43]. These include incrementalism, ‘sincere’ substantiation (e.g., explaining exactly how carbon offsets work), institutional barriers and routines, information asymmetry, and ‘agency theory’ problems (e.g., a company sincerely wants a ‘green’ product but its suppliers fail to meet standards). Yet these explanations typically frame such failures as problems to be corrected through better governance, stricter standards, or improved accountability mechanisms. Failures are thus treated as contingent obstacles rather than structural functions of capital’s relationship to sustainability.

Market failure critiques identify the limits of voluntary mechanisms and the systematic externalization of costs. The current unsustainable agro-food systems possess “an enormous amount of staying power and a capacity to maintain their dynamics despite socioenvironmental costs and risks and despite the depletion of the ‘natural capital’ of agroecosystems” [44]. Even Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks remain oriented toward managing sustainability as business risk rather than transforming the value relations that produce unsustainability [38]. Yet if voluntary mechanisms fail, why does regulatory capture so consistently prevent effective mandatory alternatives?

Power critiques document corporate concentration and governance capture. The top four firms control over 60% of global seed and agrochemical markets [45]; commodity traders and processors exercise oligopolistic power over global supply chains; and corporate actors dominate the multi-stakeholder initiatives ostensibly designed to hold them accountable [46,47,48]. These analyses illuminate who benefits from current arrangements but often lack explanatory mechanisms for how power is reproduced through and as the result of sustainability initiatives themselves.

More radical critiques locate the problem within capitalism’s structural dynamics. Eco-Marxist analyses frame corporate sustainability as ideological legitimation rather than substantive reform. Jones [49] argues that corporate social responsibility functions as a ‘legitimating ideology’ viable only in the absence of a historically grounded understanding of capitalist political economy, socializing environmental costs while privatizing benefits. Williams [50] applies Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism to theorize ‘green fetishism’, which refers to the systematic obscuring of the social and ecological relations of commodities through greenwashing and sustainability discourse. Hanlon and Fleming [51] position CSR as a strategic element of neoliberalism through which capital shifts social regulation while seeking new sources of legitimacy. Critical social theorists demonstrate that transnational corporations turn environmental devastation into profit and link unsustainability directly to corporate practices and class inequality [52]. Moore’s [53] world ecology framework extends this by theorizing capital as appropriating “cheap nature” (including cheap food, labor, energy, and raw materials). Such a framework would expose corporate sustainability as managing the conditions for continued accumulation rather than transforming them.

Eco-feminist critiques expose the gendered and colonial logic underpinning corporate sustainability. Ecofeminist scholars argue that corporate environmental strategies are fundamentally flawed, characterized by a rationalist mindset that views nature as a resource to be managed and exploited [54,55]. According to Phillips [54], mainstream corporate sustainability programs often perpetuate hierarchical binaries, such as human versus nature and reason versus emotion, which are rooted in patriarchal and masculinist logics. Irving and Helin [56] find that corporate sustainable development discourse systematically reinforces dualistic thinking that constructs nature and feminized labor as dependent ‘others.’ It thereby maintains business and economic values at the center. Critically oriented ecofeminists consider ‘green capitalism’ an oxymoron and ‘corporate environmentalism’ a ‘fix it ideology’ that fails to address the logic creating the environmental crisis [57]. Materialist ecofeminists like Salleh [58] argue that the Green Economy framework externalizes costs onto less powerful communities while failing to address the structural roots of ecosystem failure in corporate monopolies and patriarchal institutions.

Eco-anarchist perspectives document capital’s systematic capture and neutralization of alternatives. Radical ecologist Curran [59] views the mainstreaming of environmental concerns into business as a ‘victory of rhetoric over substance,’ with corporate responsibility rhetoric masking accelerating degradation and scant regard for social and environmental justice. This tradition traces the linguistic domestication of radical demands: according to Purkis [60], ‘‘zero growth’ becoming ‘sustainable development,’ ‘anti-elitism’ becoming ‘professionalization’.’ In response, eco-anarchist prefigurative praxis includes direct resistance to social–ecological destruction and the symbolic dismantling of extractivist capitalism infrastructures, encompassing opposition to corporate sustainability as system maintenance [61].

Each radical tradition offers essential insights that any adequate critical analysis must contain. Yet each also exhibits characteristic limitations for analyzing corporate sustainability as a systemic phenomenon. Eco-Marxist approaches powerfully analyze capitalism’s ecological contradictions, ideological functions, and the appropriation of ‘cheap nature.’ Yet analyses centered on accumulation dynamics, even explicitly anti-dualist frameworks, tend to treat reproductive and political dimensions as conditions for accumulation rather than as co-constitutive domains of value creation that require equivalent analytical attention [26,27,62]. While eco-feminist analyses crucially illuminate reproductive appropriation and the gendered logic of sustainability, the task of integrating them with ecological crisis dynamics and class analysis into a unified, yet non-reductive (‘flat ontology’) framework presents a persistent theoretical challenge [63]. Eco-anarchist critiques document the recuperation of radical language and the systematic capture of alternatives. However, their emphasis on prefigurative escape often lacks a structural account of why alternatives face consistent capture and frames co-optation as something radical praxis could avoid.

1.2. Toward an Integrative Critical Framework

These limitations suggest the need for an analytical framework with specific characteristics. It must integrate ecological, reproductive, productive, and political dimensions as co-constitutive rather than hierarchically ordered or ontologically flattened. It must provide an integrative explanation for why corporate sustainability initiatives systematically fail to deliver transformation even as they expand. And it must offer normative grounding for distinguishing genuine transformation from sophisticated capture, without reducing critique to external moral judgment or prescriptions for grassroots action. This paper argues that Commonist Value Theory (CVT), as elaborated in the next section, offers analytical resources that meet these requirements while building on radical traditions’ core insights. Although Section 2 provides a detailed discussion of CVT, its core contribution can be summarized here: it offers an integrated framework for examining how capital systematically appropriates life-sustaining processes and qualities across multiple spheres and explains why this appropriation functions to consistently neutralize transformative alternatives. The concept of civilizing meta-mechanism (i.e., system-stabilizing processes that soften contradictions, co-opt critique, and channel transformative energies into regime-compatible forms) offers a structural explanation for the paradox that opened this paper.

1.3. Aims and Structure

This article aims to demonstrate CVT’s analytical utility by applying it to corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems. The analysis pursues three objectives: (1) to show how CVT’s integrative framework illuminates patterns that partial critiques miss; (2) to demonstrate that corporate sustainability functions as a system-stabilizing mechanism that sustains the erosion of life-supporting relations precisely through the improvements it delivers; and (3) to explore what genuine food system transformation would require from a CVT perspective.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 develops the theoretical framework, elaborating CVT’s core concepts, True Value, Fetish Value, decommonization, and civilizing meta-mechanisms, and operationalizing them for agri-food analysis. Section 3 outlines the analytical approach or the method. Section 4 presents findings organized around CVT’s four commoning causes through examining digital agriculture platforms, regenerative agriculture branding, carbon markets, and multi-stakeholder governance. Section 5 discusses implications for understanding corporate sustainability as a systemic phenomenon and for food system transformation, as well as limitations and directions for further research. The paper ends with Section 6 as a short, conclusive statement.

2. Theoretical Framework: Commonist Value Theory

To address the characteristic limitations of the critical traditions examined in Section 1.1, Commonist Value Theory (CVT) offers an integrative framework for analyzing how capital systematically captures life-supporting processes while nullifying critical alternatives [22,24,25,26]. This section elaborates CVT’s core concepts and operationalizes them for analyzing corporate sustainability in agri-food systems.

2.1. True Value and Fetish Value

CVT’s foundational distinction is between two Weberian ideal constructs: True Value and Fetish Value. True Value refers to any quality necessary “or advantageous for the survival and self-fulfillment of organized life, human and non-human” [25,26]. In food systems, True Value encompasses what market metrics cannot fully capture: features like the fertility and evolutionary richness of soils, the sovereignty and diversity of seeds, cultural foodways and culinary knowledge, convivial relations of production and exchange, and the regenerative capacities of ecosystems that enable human and more-than-human flourishing.

Fetish Value, in contrast, represents the systematic conversion of True Value into abstract forms that serve capital accumulation rather than life reproduction. This conversion conceals both the perversion of the sources of True Value and its consequences. In agri-food systems, this perversion manifests itself in facets such as the reduction of complex agroecological relations to yield metrics, the transformation of seeds from communal heritage into proprietary genetic resources, the conversion of farming knowledge into data points for algorithmic management, and the reorganization of food provisioning around shareholder returns rather than nourishment.

On labor, CVT departs from Marxian productivism. Rather than beginning with alienated labor power already incorporated into production relations, it traces how human creative power is perverted at capital’s socio-ecological frontiers before formal production cycles begin. Creativity becomes ‘labor power’ through systematic alienation from its communal and ecological foundations. Crucially, Fetish Value is not simply ‘false’ value but perverted value: True Value that has been captured, abstracted, and redirected toward accumulation. This perversion occurs through decommonization, that is, the systematic transformation of life-supporting commons into sources of capital accumulation.

2.2. The Four Commoning Causes of True Value

Drawing on Aristotelian causality, CVT identifies four interconnected ‘commoning causes’ that together generate True Value [25,26]. These causes operate simultaneously; True Value emerges only when all four function together in what CVT terms the ‘commonist state of living.’

Creativity or creative power (the efficient cause) comprises human and more-than-human creative capacities to achieve self-sustaining collective well-living in balanced coexistence with the life domain. In food systems, this manifests through agroecological knowledge, adaptive farming practices, and the co-creative agency of a broad range of actors from workers, farmers, and community members to soil microbiomes, pollinators, and plant communities. Creativity is perverted when human creative power is decommonized and reduced to standardized labor power. CVT terms this ‘primary abstraction’: human creative power is reified and appropriated as labor power by being alienated from its organic ecological and communal foundations outside of direct capitalist production relations [26]. This occurs not only through direct ‘algorithmic management’ but through the broader imposition of rigid technical packages and asymmetrical bureaucratic power, which replace holistic judgment with corporate ‘recipes’ [64,65]. Ultimately, this process converts autonomous producers into a captive productive force by subordinating human and more-than-human agency to proprietary technologies and standardized inputs.

Liveability (the material cause) encompasses the biophysical and socio-cultural conditions for well-living, reproduced through restorative and regenerative practices under shared stewardship. In agri-food contexts, liveability includes soil health and fertility, water quality and availability, biodiversity, and climatic stability. Liveability is undermined when these conditions are degraded through extraction or when ‘sustainable’ branding fetishizes ecological conditions into marketable images while ignoring deeper regenerative capacities.

Conviviality (the formal cause) refers to the relational patterns of ‘living well together’ grounded in deep interdependence, pluriversality, and solidarity inclusive of non-humans. Food system conviviality appears in cases like seed commons, community-supported agriculture, cooperative farming, and the interdependent relationships between crops, soil organisms, and pollinators. Conviviality erodes when communal care is replaced by contractual compliance, when social connections are re-coded into supplier scores, and when capitalist market relations, corporate hierarchical structure, and state-centric relations substitute for reciprocal obligation.

Alterity (the precursor to final cause) encompasses organized prefigurative practices and subjectivities that orient relations toward more-than-human liberation and purposeful well-living (good life). In food systems, alterity is present when movements for food sovereignty, agroecology, or land reform actively practice and defend ways of producing and sharing food that refuse incorporation into capital’s logic. Alterity functions as an open-ended telos, constantly realized and reshaped through ongoing struggle. It operates through both internal dimensions (maintaining foundational values within communities and resisting the reproduction of harmful structures) and external dimensions (challenging dominant systems and expanding alternative practices into the broader world). Alterity is captured when such movements are channeled into regime-compatible reforms, for instance, when food sovereignty demands are translated into corporate ‘sustainable sourcing’ standards, or when the horizon of possibility contracts to optimizing existing arrangements. These causes are termed ‘commoning’ because each exists and functions only through relations of shared stewardship, collective practice, and mutual sustenance, which are the defining characteristics of commons. From CVT’s point of view, commons are not merely shared resources, but living systems constituted through ongoing practices of commoning: the active work of creating, maintaining, and governing shared life-supporting relations. Creativity is commoning because it emerges from collective knowledge and collaborative practice rather than individual possession. Liveability is commoning because ecosystems regenerate through stewardship and reciprocity rather than ownership and extraction. Conviviality is commoning because it constitutes the relational fabric through which communities sustain themselves and one another. Alterity is commoning because the capacity to imagine and pursue different futures is collectively held, exercised, and tested.

In what CVT terms the ‘commonist state of living,’ these four causes exist in organic interdependence, with value flowing between them through reciprocal relations [26]. True Value emerges in its own self-sustaining form only when all four function together; the perversion of any one necessarily degrades the others. This is why decommonization (i.e., the systematic perversion, enclosure, and capture of these foundational commons) represents a fundamental assault on the conditions for True Value creation. Fetish Value lacks an independent existential foundation for its own reproduction. It is ontologically parasitic, sustained only through the systemic decommonization and perversion of the four fundamental causes of True Value. Because capital functions as a ‘negative value’ that exhausts the very life domain it exploits, True Value is not an unrealistic utopia but a real potentiality with a greater inherent reality than the ‘faked actuality’ of capital [26].

2.3. Decommonization: Reification, Fetishization, and Appropriation

CVT traces the perversion of the four commoning causes/sources of True Value into sources of Fetish Value through three interconnected infra-processes that together constitute decommonization [25,26].

Reification treats dynamic, living processes as static, controllable things. When soil is reduced to a growing medium rather than a living ecosystem, when seeds become genetic information rather than evolutionary partners, when farming knowledge is codified into ‘best practices’ rather than adaptive wisdom, these represent reification. In corporate sustainability, reification appears when complex agroecological relations are converted into auditable metrics, carbon stocks, or biodiversity indices. A corporate platform that reduces soil health to a numerical index derived from sensor data, for instance, turns a living ecological system into a static, manageable input. The relational context that constitutes its actual vitality (microbial communities, farmer knowledge, seasonal cycles) is severed in the process.

Fetishization attributes value-creating power to reified things rather than to the living relations from which they emerged. When agricultural productivity is attributed to technological inputs rather than to farmers’ knowledge and ecological relationships, when food security is attributed to corporate supply chains rather than to diverse provisioning networks, value appears to inhere in commodities and technologies rather than in life-supporting relations. Corporate sustainability programs reproduce this logic when, for instance, algorithmic decision support tools are credited with ‘optimizing’ agricultural production. The underlying productivity derives from farmers’ experiential knowledge, ecological relationships, and generations of adaptive practice, but this origin is concealed.

Appropriation captures value generated through living relations and converts it into exclusive accumulation, private and/or state-controlled. This extends beyond extracting surplus value from labor to encompass the capture of ecological processes, social cooperation, cultural knowledge, and governance capacity. Farmers’ knowledge encoded into proprietary digital platforms through data extraction, for example, becomes corporate intellectual property. Value generated through collective practice and ecological relations is converted into a source of private accumulation. Corporate sustainability programs exemplify appropriation when they convert farmers’ agroecological knowledge into proprietary data, capture carbon sequestration as tradeable credits, or adapt food sovereignty discourse into supply chain management.

2.4. Civilizing Meta-Mechanisms

A core theoretical contribution of CVT is its analysis of civilizing meta-mechanisms (CMMs), through which capital manages its contradictions. These system-stabilizing processes typically soften conflicts, channel and co-opt critique, and redirect resisting and transformative energies into forms compatible with the existing regime (Chapter 4 of [26]). By acting as negative feedback loops, CMMs avert the catastrophic collapse inherent to runaway decommonization and thereby secure capital’s dominance through crisis management.

In agri-food systems, key CMMs include but are not limited to the following: (1) regulation and standardization to stabilize markets while entrenching enclosure against community alternatives; (2) the creation of pseudo-commons that disarm radical demands by adopting sustainability rhetoric without altering power structures; and (3) compensatory measures that return minimal value to depleted resources (via subsidies or rehabilitation) to permit continued exploitation without substantive restoration. Ultimately, CMMs are consequential as operational forms of Fetish Value. They manage crisis symptoms, capture and repurpose transformative energies, and facilitate capital’s adaptation, all under the guise of reform. Accordingly, corporate sustainability programs are prime examples of CMMs: they recognize crises, enact limited improvements, and assimilate critical discourse, all while deepening the decommonization of the socio-ecological relations essential for true sustainability.

2.5. Operationalizing CVT for Agri-Food Analysis

Applying CVT to corporate sustainability requires examining initiatives not merely for environmental impacts or economic efficiency, but for their fundamental orientation toward value creation. The analytical questions become Does the initiative advance re/commonization (as manifested in the expression of the expansion of shared governance, collective benefit, and life-supporting relations) or decommonization (through mechanisms such as the enclosure of commons, abstraction of life processes, and subordination of food systems to accumulation)? Does it create True Value through the four commoning causes, or primarily reorganize Fetish Value production? Does it function as a civilizing meta-mechanism?

A distinctive feature of CVT is its explicit normative stance, besides its critical–analytical dimension. Unlike conventional sustainability critiques that operate within capital’s own evaluative framework (i.e., measuring corporate initiatives against stated sustainability goals and finding implementation gaps), CVT questions the framework itself. And unlike (cultural) Marxist analyses that treat sustainability as symptomatic of capital’s contradictions, these analyses reveal how environmental programs function to manage crisis while accumulation continues. CVT, by contrast, does not leave its normative commitments implicit. Where ecofeminist and care ethics approaches ground critique in alternative values of relationality and care, CVT systematizes these commitments through the four commoning causes and provides explicit criteria for distinguishing genuine life-support from its simulation. This explicit normativity enables CVT to either reclaim ‘sustainability’ with radically transformed meaning, as the sustained regeneration of True Value through commonizing relations, or to replace it entirely with vocabulary adequate to the task of nurturing life. The framework thus offers not merely critique but a multidimensional orientation: a basis for recognizing, supporting, and expanding actually existing alternatives.

This framework yields conclusions different from conventional sustainability assessment. An initiative generating measurable environmental improvements may simultaneously abstract concrete creativity. It may, for instance, convert autonomous traditional knowledge into proprietary ‘data’ for algorithmic management or reduce farmers to a ‘captive productive force’ deskilled by rigid automated technical packages [64,66]. It may undermine liveability by slowing degradation rather than enabling regeneration, because nature is reified into tradeable ‘carbon molecules’ or ‘biodiversity units’ that serve as corporate offsets while the underlying exhaustion of the life domain remains intact [53,67,68]. It may erode conviviality by replacing reciprocal relations with contractual compliance through ‘asymmetrical bureaucratic power’ and ‘responsible credit’ systems that substitute organic communal solidarity with market dependency [64,69]. Or, it may capture alterity by channeling transformative energies into supply chain optimization through ‘fit and conform’ modes of co-optation that impose capitalist accumulation as the only possible final cause for the future of food [69]. CVT’s integrative analysis reveals these dynamics as systemically connected rather than as separate trade-offs to be balanced.

3. Materials and Methods

This paper employs critical theoretical analysis to examine corporate sustainability programs in agri-food systems. The methodology follows established traditions in critical sustainability studies, political economy, and science and technology studies, where theoretical frameworks are applied to reinterpret existing evidence and reveal systemic dynamics that conventional assessment methodologies, focused on measuring individual program outcomes against stated objectives, cannot adequately capture. The research questions driving this analysis concern structural–processual function: not whether corporate sustainability programs achieve their stated goals, but how they operate systemically in relation to value creation, and why they consistently fail to deliver transformation despite expansion. These are theoretical questions requiring theoretical methods; they cannot be answered by evaluating individual programs in isolation, however rigorously, because the patterns of interest emerge only at the systemic level and become visible only through an adequate conceptual framework.

The analysis applies Commonist Value Theory (CVT) to interrogate how corporate sustainability programs function in terms of their orientation toward value creation (True Value versus Fetish Value), their effects on the four commoning causes, and their role as civilizing meta-mechanisms. CVT’s conceptual apparatus, elaborated in Section 2, provides the analytical tools for this reinterpretation.

The analysis draws on four categories of existing sources of information. These sources span from foundational theoretical works through to empirical assessments published up to early 2026. This range is consistent with the paper’s purpose, which is to apply a theoretical framework to existing evidence rather than to collect primary data within a bounded timeframe. The first category comprises academic literature examining corporate sustainability initiatives, digital agriculture, agricultural labor conditions, and carbon market effectiveness, including critical scholarship on data governance in agriculture, regenerative agriculture programs, farmworker conditions under sustainability certification, and systematic assessments of carbon offset quality. The second consists of industry and investor analyses assessing corporate sustainability performance, including the FAIRR investor network’s 2025 assessment of regenerative agriculture commitments across 79 major agri-food firms, sectoral analyses from organizations such as Planet Tracker, and private equity investment data tracking capital flows into agricultural technology and farmland. The third includes international data on agricultural investment, food system externalities, and land use from organizations including the FAO and the Food and Land Use Coalition. The fourth comprises CVT’s foundational theoretical texts, which provide the conceptual apparatus applied throughout.

Named corporate initiatives are used illustratively rather than as case studies subject to individual evaluation. They were selected on the basis of prominence within the sector, the availability of documentation in both corporate and independent sources, and the representativeness of the structural patterns under analysis. This paper does not assess whether individual programs meet their stated targets; rather, it examines the value orientation and structural function of corporate sustainability as a systemic phenomenon.

The empirical basis for this analysis is the convergent evidence across multiple independent assessments (investor analyses, academic studies, and intergovernmental reports) that corporate sustainability investment remains oriented toward efficiency within existing models rather than structural transformation (see Section 4.1).

For each of the four commoning causes (creativity, liveability, conviviality, alterity), the analysis traces four dynamics: first, the reification processes through which commoning capacities are objectified into computable, manageable units; second, the fetishization dynamics through which corporate platforms and programs are attributed ‘value-generating power’ that, in fact, originates with farmers, workers, and ecosystems; third, the appropriation mechanisms through which alienated regenerative capacities are captured as corporate assets; fourth, the civilizing meta-mechanism functions through which critique is absorbed and transformative energies are redirected into regime-compatible forms. This approach follows established methodological precedents in critical sustainability studies see, for example, [70,71,72,73,74].

This mode of inquiry may appear to diverge from research approaches centered on primary data collection and hypothesis testing. However, the development and systematic application of novel theoretical frameworks to reinterpret existing evidence constitutes an established form of original research contribution in the social sciences and humanities; one that generates new knowledge by revealing patterns and explanatory connections that remain invisible without adequate conceptual tools. The present analysis produces original findings: it identifies ‘decommonization’ as a systemic dynamic operating across corporate sustainability initiatives, explains why such initiatives expand while failing to deliver transformation, and develops criteria for distinguishing genuine alternatives from sophisticated capture. These findings emerge from the analytical work of applying CVT to this domain, not from the sources synthesized or systematically reviewed, and represent this paper’s contribution to knowledge.

4. Results: Corporate Sustainability as Civilizing Meta-Mechanism

4.1. The Gap Between Sustainability Rhetoric and Structural Reality

Before examining how corporate sustainability programs function as civilizing meta-mechanisms (CMMs) that sustain perversion processes, it is necessary to establish the scale and orientation of corporate sustainability investment, and the persistent gap between this investment and what genuine transformation would require. This gap is evident across multiple dimensions: the scale of investment relative to sector revenues, the significant investment gap, and the continued externalization of costs onto ecosystems and communities, and the orientation of that investment toward incremental efficiency rather than structural change.

4.1.1. Scale: Large in Absolute Terms, Marginal Relative to Need

The global food and grocery market is valued at approximately USD 12.8–13.2 trillion in 2025, with projections exceeding USD 17 trillion by the mid-2030s [10]. Agriculture commands a vast physical footprint: as of 2023, the world’s agricultural land area totaled roughly 4.8 billion hectares, including 1.6 billion hectares of cropland and 3.2 billion hectares of managed pasture [75]. Together, these figures emphasize both the immense economic scale of global agri-food systems and their pivotal role in managing the world’s ecological resources.

Within this vast sector, corporate sustainability investment represents a small fraction. Annual agricultural innovation funding for the Global South is estimated at approximately USD 60 billion, representing only “4.5% of the region’s agricultural output and less than USD 20 per person per year” [37,38]. Private corporations have contributed approximately USD 13 billion annually over the last decade, focusing primarily on R&D and marketing [37,38]. Critically, less than 7% of total agricultural innovation funding has detectable environmental intentions, and under 5% has both social and environmental intentions [37].

The gap between current investment and what would be required for genuine sustainability becomes stark when set against credible transition scenarios. Estimates suggest “that additional agricultural R&D investments of USD 4 billion per year above baseline,” coupled with USD 6.5 billion per year in climate-smart technical options, would be needed merely to reduce global hunger to 5% and achieve 2030 greenhouse gas emission reductions consistent with Paris Agreement pathways [76]. The required R&D investment for climate adaptation alone is estimated at 16–118% higher than current global spending trends would provide [77].

More ambitiously, the Food and Land Use Coalition estimates that approximately USD 205 billion per year in sustainability-related investment from agri-food companies between 2025 and 2030 would be needed to mitigate roughly half of projected food system emissions, equivalent to less than 2% of the sector’s projected USD 13 trillion in annual revenues over that period [78]. The hidden costs of the current system dwarf these investment gaps: current externalities are estimated at approximately USD 19.8 trillion annually, nearly double the USD 9 trillion value of global food consumption at market prices [20,21].

4.1.2. Orientation: Efficiency Without Transformation

Beyond the scale and gap issues, the orientation of corporate sustainability investment raises fundamental questions. Current food systems are highly resilient, able to sustain their existing patterns even in the face of environmental and social costs and the ongoing depletion of agroecosystems’ natural resources [44]. Corporate sustainability strategies typically focus on internal business operations and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and need to expand to cover core business activities under Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks [38]. Yet even ESG frameworks remain oriented toward managing sustainability as a business risk rather than transforming the value relations that produce unsustainability. Independent monitors find efforts insufficiently scaled, particularly for Scope 3 emissions, with indirect value-chain emissions comprising 80–95% of sector footprints [78].

A 2025 analysis by the FAIRR Initiative (formerly the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return), an investor network founded in 2015 that assesses environmental, social, and governance risks in global food companies, examined 79 major agri-food firms worth a combined USD 3 trillion [39]. While 63% of these firms recognize regenerative agriculture as a solution to climate change and biodiversity loss, 64% of those making such recognition have not outlined any quantitative company-wide targets, including major brands such as Chipotle, Domino’s, and Bunge. Only 36% have quantified targets for regenerative agriculture, and just 16% discuss metrics and data [39].

These patterns (substantial investment that nonetheless remains marginal relative to need; orientation toward efficiency within existing models rather than structural transformation; systematic externalization of costs that sustainability programs leave untouched) require explanation. CVT provides an integrative analytical-normative explanation for these patterns. Corporate sustainability programs function as civilizing meta-mechanisms (CMMs) that actively fortify the decommonization of the four commoning causes while making this perversion appear as progress. The analysis that follows traces how each commoning cause continues to undergo decommonization through the stages of reification, fetishization, and appropriation, under corporate sustainability programs that function to smooth and legitimize each transition.

4.2. The Decommonization of Creativity

The first commoning cause to examine is creativity. How do corporate sustainability programs affect the creative capacities of farmers, workers, and ecosystems? The creative power of such actors, accumulated through generations of co-evolution, experiential learning, and adaptive innovation, faces systematic alienation through corporate sustainability platforms. The orientation of corporate investment toward “farm mechanization, crop protection, seed development, and biotechnology” [38] rather than toward innovation, led by (more than) human creative agents, reflects this dynamic. Creativity continues to be extracted from commoning sources and enclosed within the proprietary domains of corporate sustainability R&D.

4.2.1. Farmer Knowledge and Digital Agriculture

In terms of reification, the rapid expansion of digital farming platforms exemplifies the data-driven vision of agricultural ‘modernization’ that characterizes contemporary corporate sustainability. Major digital farming platforms are built around soil and crop sensors, satellite and drone imagery, cloud-based analytics, and machine learning tools for input optimization and yield prediction. This vision is marketed as enhancing sustainability by improving input efficiency, reducing waste, and lowering environmental impacts, though independent evidence on these outcomes remains uneven and context-dependent.

Atasoy [6], drawing on Espeland and Stevens’s [79] concept of ‘commensuration,’ analyzes how these platforms objectify farmers’ experiential, tacit, and collective capacities. Agroecologically and experientially diverse ways of knowing are converted into standardized, computationally comparable data units within Big Data systems. Human perceptions and sense-making are reorganized through computational sensors; farmer knowledge becomes mere ‘user inputs’ in algorithmic systems; the co-creative adaptations of crops to local conditions are reduced to genetic markers and growth parameters. Creativity is thereby stripped of its subjective, relational character and converted into objectified information amenable to corporate processing.

The corporate capture of regenerative agriculture follows the same pattern. Programs such as Nestlé’s regenerative agriculture commitments discussed earlier, PepsiCo’s ‘Positive Agriculture’ program (aiming to scale regenerative practices across 7 million acres by 2030), and Danone’s regenerative agriculture partnerships represent major corporate strategies that have moved from pledge to partial implementation [1,2,5,80]. These frameworks are sustained by extensive communication campaigns positioning sustainability as a foundation for business resilience and brand value.

Yet within these programs, the creative practices of regenerative producers are translated into corporate KPIs and standardized metrics that can be measured, reported, and compared. The relational, contextual, and tacit dimensions of these practices (careful observation of ecological interactions, place-based adaptation, the experimental integration of traditional and scientific knowledge) are stripped away in the process. What emerges from the situated, experimental creativity of farmers working with specific soils, climates, and ecologies is translated into replicable procedures that can be implemented across diverse contexts without the creative intelligence that generated them. The FAIRR finding that farmer-based targets remain “the least cited in regenerative commitments overall” [39] reflects this systematic marginalization of farmer creativity even within programs nominally oriented toward farmer practices.

These reified data then undergo fetishization as algorithms receive credit for ‘optimizing’ production, though the actual creativity emerges from farmers’ and more-than-human beings’ capacity to common. Platforms are marketed as sources of agricultural innovation, their algorithmic rationality promoted as superior to farmers’ experiential knowledge. This assigns ‘epistemic authority’ to standardized digital information. Human judgment is thus rendered redundant in the process [6,81].

Despite poor design and configuration that impose significant harm on agricultural communities, AI systems are nonetheless attributed epistemic authority [82,83]. The technology is fetishized as the source of agricultural innovation even as it leads to the disenfranchisement of farmers from control over their own farms [83]. In regenerative agriculture programs, corporate brands like Nestlé and PepsiCo position themselves as regeneration leaders. Their programs are fetishized as primary drivers of productivity and resilience. Farmers, meanwhile, bear the upfront transition costs, yield risks, and implementation burdens with minimal premiums or direct compensation for on-farm innovation [31,84].

While the corporate recognition of regenerative agriculture is normally treated as evidence of progress, the discursive claim in most cases substitutes for operational commitment [39]; this exemplifies fetishizations. Sustainable agriculture investment has reportedly grown by 32.5% annually since 2013, with the global market for sustainable agriculture products projected to reach USD 872.7 billion [85]. Yet these figures must be interpreted cautiously: they often conflate genuinely transformative investment with conventional agriculture rebranded as ‘sustainable,’ which illustrates how the category itself has become fetishized as a marker of progress regardless of substantive content.

Through appropriation, this alienated creative power is captured as proprietary assets. Farmers’ knowledge encoded into machine learning systems, whether in Bayer’s crop models, John Deere’s yield algorithms, or Microsoft’s soil analytics, becomes corporate intellectual property. Adaptive responses of crops and pests generate monetized data streams; farmers’ creative problem-solving feeds back into system improvements owned by corporations. By granting intellectual property protections on proprietary AI technologies, the system deters competition, enables monopolistic pricing, and concentrates control over agricultural knowledge in corporate hands [86]. Bless et al. [68] show how regenerative agriculture in Australia is increasingly articulated through ‘nature market’ logics, where producers’ regenerative practices are valued less as place-based forms of creative care and more as platforms for generating tradeable co-benefits. In this process, the creative capacity of farmers and ecosystems is appropriated for corporate value chains.

The system establishes what Atasoy [6], following Johns [87] and Stone [88], describes as ‘governance-by-data’ and ‘surveillance agriculture,’ effectively appropriating decision-making and forcing farming practices onto specific digital pathways. Corporate partners crowdsource farmers’ valuable experiential knowledge into field-trial seed databases and convert communally shared public knowledge into quantified digital units controlled by capital. Since 2010, when approximately 190 private equity firms targeted USD 13.3 billion for agriculture investments [89], Private Equity activity has expanded significantly, with 129 documented US cultivation deals between 2018 and 2023 and annual AgTech equity deployments reaching USD 3.8 billion in 2024 [90,91]. This capital flow represents systematic appropriation of agricultural creativity through converting farmer innovation into investable assets controlled by financial actors with no stake in farming communities.

The CMM function operates throughout this process. Digital platforms present themselves as empowering farmers through ‘precision’ and ‘smart’ agriculture, co-opting apprehensions about deskilling and dependency by promising enhanced productivity and reduced environmental impact. Regenerative certification schemes and premium prices create an appearance of value recognition while extraction continues. This manages farmer dissatisfaction with minimal payouts while corporations generate substantial brand value. Farmer resistance is managed through ‘co-design’ processes and ‘user feedback’ mechanisms that provide voice without power. The decommonization of creativity thus appears not as dispossession but as modernization, presented as an upgrade from traditional to ‘data-driven’ farming or from ‘conventional’ to ‘regenerative’ supply chains that farmers are encouraged to accept as sustainable progress/development.

4.2.2. Agricultural Labor

The decommonization of creativity extends beyond farmers’ knowledge to encompass the creative labor of agricultural workers. Corporate sustainability programs systematically obscure this labor while appropriating its value. The concept of ‘precarious foodscapes’ captures how the corporate food regime deepens its exploitation of compensated human labor, unpaid human labor, and more-than-human labor simultaneously [92]. Despite sustainability branding, 62% of forced labor risk in the U.S. food supply originates from domestic production or processing, particularly in animal-based proteins and processed fruits [93]. This precarity is not an unfortunate side effect of otherwise sustainable systems but is structurally produced by the same decommonization processes that capture farmer creativity.

These two dimensions of creative decommonization (the capture of farmer knowledge and the exploitation of agricultural labor) are mutually constitutive. In Marxian terms, the reification of experiential knowledge into algorithmic protocols creates the conditions for the real abstraction of agricultural labor. When farming is reduced to the execution of standardized procedures dictated by corporate digital platforms, the concrete, qualitatively rich labor of agricultural workers becomes increasingly interchangeable and abstract. Workers become mere executors of algorithmic instructions, their creative capacities rendered redundant by systems that claim to already contain the relevant knowledge.

Reification of workers’ embodied skills, situational judgment, and adaptive capacities reduces them to abstract labor inputs, costs to be minimized, ‘human resources’ to be managed, and productivity metrics to be optimized. Employment in agriculture and food production is characteristically temporary and insecure, marked by poor working conditions, long hours, and lack of legal or social benefits [94]. Agricultural workers, particularly migrants and casual laborers, face persistent challenges in global food systems, yet representative data on their conditions remain inadequate for rigorous critical analysis due to their highly uncertain status [95].

Fetishization operates through corporate sustainability and ethical sourcing strategies that claim to address labor concerns while affecting only a limited portion of workers due to minimal market shares of certified goods [95]. Certification schemes, ethical codes, and CSR reporting become fetishized as evidence of fair treatment, and corporations receive credit for improvements. The structural conditions that produce precarity remain unchanged. As Gray [96] documents, labor practices on many local farms (often cited as models of sustainable food systems) mimic those of the dominant food system, contributing to the extreme vulnerability of farmworkers even as these operations receive recognition for environmental sustainability.

Appropriation of workers’ creative labor is particularly stark for migrant farmworkers, who are thrust into the agri-food sector under conditions of inequitable employment and limited regulatory protection despite certification initiatives intended to improve conditions [97]. The employment of cheap and exploitable migrant labor is key to the survival and profitability of agri-food enterprises and supports corporate innovation and restructuring processes [98]. Labor precarity is not a failure of corporate sustainability but a condition of its success. Klassen [99] and Klassen et al. [100] document how even certified organic farming in Canada relies on ‘unfree’ racialized migrant workers subject to abuse and exploitation. In other words, environmental sustainability certifications do not necessarily guarantee social justice for labor.

A key function of CMMs here is to disarm labor critique through corporate sustainability programs. Ethical sourcing initiatives present themselves as addressing worker concerns while remaining structurally ineffective for the large, vulnerable temporary, seasonal, and migrant workforce [94]. As Luna [101] argues, agricultural law itself structurally produces difficult working conditions while facilitating the impoverishment of farm laborers—a legal architecture of exclusion that sustainability certifications neither challenge nor remedy. A genuinely transformative alternative, as demonstrated by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program., requires worker-driven social responsibility models that fundamentally restructure power relations in supply chains [102] (see https://fairfoodprogram.org/, accessed on 12 December 2025). The program combines a code of conduct, premium-based wage increases, and worker-led enforcement to address abuses, including forced labor and sexual assault, and is widely recognized as offering the strongest labor protections in US agriculture. Its Worker-Driven Social Responsibility model requires the kind of structural transformation that corporate sustainability programs are designed to avoid: it fundamentally restructures power relations in supply chains rather than managing them through voluntary certification."

4.3. The Decommonization of Liveability

The second commoning cause concerns liveability. The material conditions necessary for life (e.g., soil health, water cycles, biodiversity, climate stability) undergo their own decommonization journey through corporate sustainability programs. The nearly USD 20 trillion in annual externalities documented by von Braun and Hendriks [21] represents only the quantified costs of this decommonization: the conversion of living systems into inputs for accumulation, with the costs of degradation shifted onto ecosystems, communities, and future generations.

Through reification, natural systems are fragmented, standardized, and reified into measurable ‘components’ or KPIs, such as NPK ratios, irrigation schedules, pest–predator ratios, and carbon sequestration rates [82]. Biotechnology and data sciences transform biological materials into a technically manageable information state, and treat the so-called nature as the object of thought and action rather than as a co-creative subject [6]. Corporate regenerative agriculture programs intensify this reification: living soil processes are reduced to carbon metrics; watershed health becomes retention coefficients; biodiversity is translated into pollinator counts or habitat indices.

Initiatives such as Unilever’s Climate & Nature Fund [3,4], Nestlé’s climate action investments, and Coca-Cola’s sustainable agriculture and watershed stewardship initiatives [103] exemplify how ecological processes are translated into corporate sustainability metrics. While these programs generate impressive reporting, they simultaneously convert the rich, place-specific, temporally extended processes through which ecosystems regenerate into standardized measurements that can be compared, aggregated, and traded across vastly different contexts.

These metrics then become fetishized as if they themselves constitute healthy, living agroecosystems. Carbon sequestration rates stand in for soil health; water use efficiency masquerades as hydrological sustainability; biodiversity indices replace the complex regenerative capacity of ecosystems. The fetishistic goal of optimizing ‘biological efficiencies’ and achieving predictability and control through technologies like CRISPR-Cas displaces attention from the actual conditions that allow land, water, and living systems to sustain life over time [6]. The finding that only 16% of major agri-food firms ‘discuss metrics and data’ for regenerative agriculture [39] might appear to indicate insufficient measurement. But, from a CVT perspective, the deeper problem is that even robust measurement would fetishize indicators while leaving the underlying decommonization of ecosystems’ life-supporting capacity intact.

The appropriation phase converts these material bases into enclosed assets. Soil carbon becomes tradeable credits, which financializes the atmosphere and permits continued emissions elsewhere. Water ‘savings’ justify expansion into water-scarce regions. Genetic resources are captured through patents that transform living processes into privately owned assets or what Polanyi [104] would call “fictitious commodities” [6]. The energy demands of AI-driven agricultural systems, for data processing, environmental controls, and cloud computing, are substantial. Therefore, rather than regenerating the ecological foundations of production, material resources are normally appropriated to sustain technological infrastructure [105].

The CMM function is particularly evident here. Corporate sustainability programs present the measurement and trading of ecosystem functions as ‘valuing nature.’ Carbon markets, biodiversity offsets, and payments for ecosystem services appear as mechanisms for internalizing externalities and aligning economic incentives with ecological outcomes. This framing can deflect environmentalist critique through a performative response, all the while deepening the reification and commodification of living systems.

Empirical evidence increasingly shows that market-based ecosystem service schemes systematically overstate their environmental benefits. A complementary firm-level analysis of the twenty largest corporate buyers on the voluntary carbon market finds that 87% of the offsets they retire are cheap, high-risk credits unlikely to deliver real emission reductions—a fact that led the authors to conclude that prevailing offset practices function largely as greenwashing see [106].

4.4. The Decommonization of Conviviality

The third commoning cause is conviviality. The collaborative relationships that constitute conviviality between farmers, between humans and more-than-human beings, between crops and their ecological partners, follow a parallel decommonization trajectory. The systematic externalization of costs documented earlier depends on the prior fragmentation of convivial relationships that might otherwise enable collective resistance.

These relationships are reified into isolated interactions mediated by technology. Farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing becomes ‘user forums’ on proprietary platforms [107]. Multispecies mutualisms are reduced to individually manageable ‘ecosystem services’ [108]. Communally shared knowledge and evaluation processes are subjected to homogenization through classification tools that formally harmonize data into machine-readable concepts [6].

The collaborative relationships inherent in regenerative agriculture are particularly vulnerable to this reification. Farmer learning networks built over years of shared experimentation, multispecies partnerships developed through attentive engagement with particular places, and community seed systems sustained through reciprocal exchange become supplier relationships when captured by programs like PepsiCo’s Positive Agriculture or Danone’s regenerative partnerships. Peer-to-peer learning is replaced by corporate training programs that transmit standardized protocols rather than cultivating shared inquiry [109].

Through fetishization, these platforms claim to create connection and collaboration by presenting ‘smart farming communities’ as innovative cooperation, while actual farming communities fragment. Rural field officers exploit long-established informal relationships and trust to promote the adoption of high-tech platforms. They would thus convert genuine convivial relations into mechanisms for corporate market entry and control [6]. Corporate regenerative programs similarly fetishize themselves as building ‘farmer networks’ and ‘regenerative communities,’ while the actual convivial relations that sustained traditional and agroecological farming are replaced by contractual obligations to corporate supply chains.

Through appropriation, these convivial relations are captured and monetized. Social networks among farmers become market analysis data; traditional practices of seed sharing are enclosed within proprietary systems. The uneven distribution of AI systems due to limited internet access and lack of technical expertise fragments farming communities into those with access and those without [110]. Algorithmic bias stemming from training data limits smallholder farmers’ choices and perpetuates cycles of exclusion [111]. The disenfranchisement of farmers from control over their own operations represents an appropriation of the convivial self-governance that characterizes non-industrial farming communities [112].

The CMM function presents this decommonization as enhanced connectivity and collaboration. Corporate platforms promote ‘farmer networks,’ ‘data cooperatives,’ and ‘learning communities’ that simulate collective governance while maintaining corporate control. ‘Multi-stakeholder’ roundtables and partnership platforms can provide venues for ‘participation’ that risk absorbing and redirecting oppositional energy. The 2021 UN Food Systems Summit illustrates this tendency. The Summit shifted governance from traditional multilateralism to multi-stakeholderism, integrating corporations and philanthropic foundations alongside civil society on an ostensibly level playing field. Corporate actors and billionaire foundations were able to shape the narrative of ‘transformation’ while power asymmetries went largely unaddressed [113]. Critics argued that urgent issues like land concentration and corporate control were depoliticized, with participation reduced to what some termed ‘spurious’ involvement that marginalized the radical demands of peasant movements.

Similarly, when the FAO institutionalized agroecology through its global dialogue process, the resulting framework omitted references to international trade policy, GMOs, and food sovereignty—sanitization that risked reducing agroecology to a technical ‘toolbox’ compatible with industrial models like ‘climate-smart agriculture’ [64,114]. At local scales, Urban Food Policy Councils, ostensibly designed to democratize food governance, can become what Haysom and Battersby [113] describe as ‘Janus-faced’ arrangements, where participatory processes may build consensus around dominant economic interests while marginalizing informal food vendors and other vulnerable actors. These examples suggest a recurring pattern: the forms of participation expand while their transformative substance tends to contract.

4.5. The Decommonization of Alterity

The fourth and final commoning cause is alterity: the capacity to envision and practice genuinely different futures through prefigurative practices and transformative subjectivities. Perhaps most consequentially, this capacity undergoes systematic decommonization through corporate sustainability programs. The ‘enormous staying power’ of current corporatized food systems documented by Buttel et al. [44] depends not merely on economic arrangements but on the systematic foreclosure of alternative imaginaries.

The prefigurative vision of regenerative agriculture as systemic transformation is particularly vulnerable to this reification. What began as a radical reimagining of agriculture’s relationship to land, community, and future generations is reduced to incremental practice changes within industrial supply chains when captured by programs like Nestlé’s regenerative commitments or PepsiCo’s Positive Agriculture (see [115]). The modification of crops and livestock to better accommodate AI technologies represents a stark inversion: rather than technology serving alternative agricultural visions, living beings are reshaped to fit technological parameters [84].

Farmers’ experiments with ecological agriculture risk reduction to algorithmic optimization data points; Indigenous farming cosmologies face pressure to become ‘traditional knowledge’ inputs amenable to corporate integration; and food sovereignty movements are increasingly channeled toward ‘stakeholder participation’ in platform development. The peasant value orientation toward sufficiency and autonomous existence tends to be reconceptualized within a normative framework of efficiency optimization, where diverse lifeways become legible only as quantified output [6,116].

Corporate platforms fetishize themselves as vehicles for agricultural transformation, with ‘digital revolution’ and ‘data-driven farming’ proclaimed as the sustainable future. The priority of efficiency and productivity optimization expands a productivist ontology that serves as the final cause of Fetish Value production. AI is positioned as the inevitable future of food systems, with automated production systems presented as the solution to climate change and food security challenges. This would elevate technological pathways to the status of inevitability, and in doing so forecloses alternative visions [105,117]. Corporate programs become fetishized as the path to agricultural transformation, with ‘regenerative brands’ positioned as change agents and corporate narratives of ‘feeding the world sustainably’ foreclosing more radical alternatives [118].

The appropriation of alterity constrains producers’ autonomy within platform parameters, undermines communities’ capacity to develop alternative agri-food systems through lock-in effects, and captures the language of transformation itself (e.g., sustainability, regeneration, resilience) to describe platform adoption. The deployment of AI-driven agricultural systems is often led by non-agricultural technology companies with interests fundamentally different from those of farming communities [113]. Even authentic farmer movements for regeneration are claimed as evidence of corporate leadership, their transformative energy redirected toward legitimizing the very system they sought to transcend.

The CMM function here is the most insidious. By capturing the language and of transformation, corporate sustainability programs close down the imaginative space for alternatives. When ‘regenerative agriculture’ becomes a corporate brand strategy, when ‘food system transformation’ means adopting digital platforms from large corporations, and when ‘sustainability’ is defined by corporate metrics, the capacity to envision genuinely different futures is systematically undermined. Alterity is not merely suppressed but appropriated, its transformative energy redirected toward legitimizing the very system it sought to transcend.

4.6. Why Corporate Sustainability Cannot Transform Food Systems

This analysis shows why corporate sustainability programs, whatever their stated intentions, cannot act as genuine game changers in food system transformation. Their structural role in stabilizing the existing value regime orients them toward maintenance rather than deeper change.

First, corporate sustainability initiatives cannot fundamentally challenge the decommonization processes that underpin corporate profitability. In CVT, capital is both the product and the process of decommonization. Programs may slow decommonization in some areas and accelerate it in others; they may shift the locations and forms of extraction while preserving its overall direction. They cannot reverse decommonization, because that would undermine the value relations that sustain corporate existence.

Second, by capturing the language and legitimacy of sustainability, these initiatives narrow the space available for alternatives. Once sustainability is defined within corporate parameters, projects that exceed those parameters may appear unrealistic or extreme. The Overton Window of food system possibilities shrinks even as sustainability rhetoric multiplies. Movements that genuinely pursue commonization must compete for legitimacy with corporate programs that command far greater resources and cultural authority. The FAIRR finding [39] that regenerative agriculture functions primarily as a discursive claim rather than an operational commitment illustrates this dynamic: the claim itself offsets transformative potential.

Third, this stabilizing role shapes how critique is received. Criticisms of greenwashing tend to trigger what can be called performative transparency: additional reports, metrics, and disclosures. This increases the volume of information without altering the practices that generate unsustainability. Demands for farmer voice typically lead to multi-stakeholder platforms that offer participation without real power. Calls for systemic change are met with declarations of ‘transformation’ that treat the scaling of existing corporate approaches as structural change.

Taken together, these dynamics turn sustainability discourse into a way of managing capitalism’s socio-ecological contradictions without resolving them. Accumulation continues under the sign of regeneration. What appears as transformation is in fact the extension of decommonization into new domains, in which each ‘solution’ opens fresh frontiers for converting True Value into Fetish Value while narrating this conversion as progress.

This does not mean that corporate sustainability investments produce no benefits. Efficiency gains, lower emissions per unit of output, and improvements for some producers are real, although limited. From a CVT perspective, however, these gains do not define the structural function of corporate sustainability. They are the means through which relative stabilization may occur: enough improvement to maintain legitimacy, while the underlying dynamics that cause crisis remain intact. Corporate sustainability programs sustain unsustainability by making it appear manageable, by deferring the structural changes that genuine transformation requires, and by capturing the moral and political legitimacy of sustainability discourse for continued accumulation.

5. Discussion

5.1. Theoretical Contributions

The above analysis demonstrated CVT’s capacity to provide an integrative explanation for patterns that existing critical frameworks identify but struggle to explain systematically. Where greenwashing critiques document the gap between rhetoric and reality, CVT can reveal why this gap is structurally produced rather than contingent. Critical political economy approaches trace corporate power in food systems by documenting market concentration, mapping supply chain governance, and identifying who benefits from current arrangements. CVT expands this by explicating how that power operates through the systematic perversion of value relations. Political economy shows that power exists and who holds it; CVT reveals how that power is constituted and reconstituted through decommonization. Corporate sustainability programs do not merely reflect existing power relations but actively reproduce them by converting life-supporting commons into sources of accumulation. Where eco-Marxist and eco-feminist analyses highlight exploitation of productive and affective labor and nature, CVT integrates these insights within a unified framework. The decommonization of creativity, liveability, conviviality, and alterity is shown to involve mutually constitutive processes.

The concept of civilizing meta-mechanisms (CMMs), as a negative feedback loop in the process of decommonization, offers particular analytical leverage. By revealing corporate sustainability programs as system-stabilizing rather than system-transforming, CVT explains why such programs proliferate alongside deepening crisis. This effectiveness lies not just in capturing a narrative, but in structurally re-orienting alternative practices through standardization, regulation, and administrative control [119]. Rather than a failure of implementation, CMMs represent the active institutionalization of a compromised version of sustainability that restructures social and ecological zones in capital’s image. Through tools such as voluntary standards and technical fixes, CMMs provide ‘simulated care’ that increases the endurance of depleted sources of value. Their radical potential is neutralized, and the underlying mechanisms of accumulation are preserved [120].

This framework can also illuminate why corporate sustainability investment remains systematically misallocated despite mounting evidence of crisis. The orientation toward mechanization and biotechnology rather than farmer-led innovation is not a correctable bias but reflects the structural imperative to decommonize creativity by relocating it from commons to corporate control [38]. Similarly, the persistent inadequacy of Scope 3 emissions strategies [121] reflects not technical difficulty but structural incapacity: genuinely addressing supply chain emissions would require challenging the decommonization processes upon which corporate value extraction depends.

5.2. Distinguishing Authentic Alternatives from Corporate Capture

A full exploration falls outside this paper’s scope, but CVT’s key practical contribution arguably lies in its ability to distinguish genuine alternatives from corporate simulacra. Authentic transformation differs from co-optation not because it uses different techniques, but because value flows in a different direction and decision-making power is located elsewhere.

Corporate regenerative agriculture programs and farmer-led agroecology movements can look similar at the level of practice, yet their relationships to the four commoning causes diverge sharply. In corporate programs, creativity usually flows from producers to digital platforms, from experiential knowledge and agency to proprietary algorithms. In farmer, peasant, domestic laborer, and Indigenous movements, creativity normally circulates among practitioners and accumulates as shared intelligence that remains under collective stewardship. Corporate initiatives typically reify liveability into tradeable metrics. Outside capital’s influence, agroecological practice centers on the situated, living processes inherent to fields, forests, rivers, and soil. Corporate platforms simulate conviviality through curated ‘farmer networks’, even as they fragment actual communities. In contrast, food sovereignty movements typically build solidarity through shared struggle and mutual aid. Corporate sustainability tends to close alterity by defining transformation within parameters that do not disrupt accumulation. Movements for food sovereignty, land reform, and democratic control of food systems keep genuinely different futures open.

These contrasts become vivid in specific cases. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program [102] represents re-commonization in practice. Workers drive social responsibility standards and restructure power relations rather than allowing their demands to be translated into corporate CSR formats. La Via Campesina’s food sovereignty framework also expresses (re-)commonization. Peasant-led agroecology, seed sovereignty, and democratic control of food systems generate value that refuses incorporation into corporate value chains. Community-supported agriculture projects, food policy councils, community land trusts, and solidarity economy networks embody commonizing logics when they preserve the commoning character of creativity, liveability, conviviality, and alterity rather than outsourcing these qualities to external authorities.

CVT thus provides diagnostic criteria for cutting through proliferating sustainability claims. We can ask the following: Where does decision-making power actually reside? Are the material conditions for life being regenerated or merely monitored? Do relationships of solidarity deepen, or are they simulated through corporate platforms? And do genuinely different futures remain open? These questions help identify where authentic transformation is occurring and where civilizing meta-mechanisms have successfully absorbed transformative energy into regime-compatible forms.

5.3. Beyond Assessment: CVT as Guide for Transformative Praxis

The normative dimension of CVT reaches beyond diagnosis and provides orientation for building alternatives. True Value is defined as a set of qualities that are definitive and advantageous for the survival, self-fulfillment, and liberation of more-than-human organized life [26]. This definition allows movements to use CVT as a compass when constructing alternatives to corporate-dominated food systems.

First, CVT suggests that effective transformation requires strategies that strengthen all four commoning causes together. When movements focus only on ecological regeneration and leave the decommonization of creativity untouched, they leave themselves exposed to corporate programs that adopt regenerative techniques while preserving extractive relations. When labor struggles focus only on wages and conditions without addressing alterity, they can achieve real gains within existing structures without confronting the value relations that generate exploitation. When Community-Supported Agriculture initiatives cultivate conviviality but neglect liveability, they may produce vibrant local communities on land that continues to degrade. CVT insists on the interdependence of creativity, liveability, conviviality, and alterity and therefore implies that lasting transformation requires strategies that attend to this whole configuration rather than to isolated dimensions.

Second, the framework clarifies the relation between ‘restorative’ and ‘originative’ strategies [29,63]. ‘Re-commonization’ is essential. Movements need to resist decommonization, reclaim what has already been appropriated, expose the fetish character of corporate sustainability, and undo the reification of social and ecological relationships into commodities and metrics. Yet these defensive efforts are not sufficient on their own. ‘Commonization’ is also required. New forms of commoning must emerge that do more than oppose capital and that build institutions and practices capable of sustaining life beyond its logic. Ecovillages, community land trusts, worker-owned cooperatives, seed libraries, community kitchens, and solidarity economy networks already perform this role to different degrees. CVT reframes such initiatives not as marginal lifestyle niches but as prefigurative infrastructures. When integrated with political movements that fundamentally challenge capital’s value regime, these infrastructures can generate the True Value essential for post-capitalist food systems.

Finally, CVT helps movements anticipate and resist co-optation. The framework maps how civilizing meta-mechanisms operate: through the capture of language, the simulation of participation, and the redirection of energy into regime-compatible forms. This analysis illuminates the specific vulnerabilities that movements must guard against. Organizational designs that distribute creative agency broadly, governance structures that keep decision-making rooted in affected communities, and strategic orientations that refuse to contract the horizon of possibility all reduce susceptibility to capture. CVT, therefore, functions not only as a lens for analyzing corporate sustainability programs but as a practical resource for those who seek to expand and defend commoning against ongoing decommonization.

5.4. Limitations and Future Research

This analysis has several limitations that indicate directions for future research. First, as a theoretical application drawing on secondary literature, it does not provide primary empirical evidence of decommonization processes in specific corporate programs. Future research could apply CVT’s analytical framework to detailed case studies of particular initiatives. Second, the framework requires further development regarding the mechanisms through which CMMs foreclose alternatives. How exactly do corporate programs capture transformative language? Through what processes does participation in multi-stakeholder platforms neutralize opposition? Detailed analysis of these mechanisms could inform strategies for resistance.

Third, the analysis focuses on corporate sustainability programs without systematically comparing them to alternatives. Research comparing CVT analyses of corporate programs with analyses of food sovereignty initiatives, community-supported agriculture, or Indigenous food systems could sharpen our understanding of what distinguishes genuine re/commonization from corporate co-optation. (I am pursuing this comparative analysis in a forthcoming book; the present paper comprises one of its core chapters.)

Fourth, CVT’s normative and praxiological foundations (i.e., the grounding of True Value in the flourishing of ‘more-than-human organized life’) require further elaboration. By what processes do communities converge upon shared conceptions of the good life and human flourishing? How are conflicts between human and non-human flourishing adjudicated? Engagement with environmental ethics, Indigenous philosophies, and critical animal studies could deepen CVT’s normative framework.

Finally, the analysis has focused on corporate sustainability in agri-food systems, but the framework has broader applicability. Corporate sustainability programs in energy, extractives, manufacturing, housing, and other sectors likely exhibit similar CMM functions. Comparative analysis across sectors could test the generalizability of CVT’s insights and reveal sector-specific dynamics.

5.5. Implications for Policy and Practice

For policymakers, this analysis suggests caution regarding partnerships with corporate sustainability initiatives. Programs that seem to advance sustainability goals may in fact serve mainly as civilizing meta-mechanisms that absorb public resources and legitimacy while leaving decommonization processes intact. Policy frameworks oriented toward genuine transformation would support farmer-led innovation rather than corporate platforms, strengthen worker power and autonomy rather than certification schemes, and build democratic food governance rather than multi-stakeholder platforms dominated by corporate interests.

For practitioners such as farmers, food workers, activists, and communities, CVT offers both warning and direction. The warning is that corporate sustainability programs, however attractive their resources and rhetoric, are structurally oriented toward capturing rather than supporting transformative initiatives. The direction must be toward building and defending genuine commons: farmer-controlled seed systems, worker-owned processing facilities, community land trusts, solidarity economy networks, and democratic food policy institutions. These require different strategies than engagement with corporate programs. The orientation must be toward autonomous power rather than corporate partnership.

For researchers, the analysis suggests the value of CVT as a framework for food systems scholarship. This is particularly pressing given the increasing orientation of university research toward corporate-partnered projects. Neoliberal restructuring of higher education has deepened institutional dependence on private funding, with agricultural research especially susceptible to corporate influence through industry partnerships, sponsored chairs, and foundation grants aligned with commercial priorities. This financial dependence risks epistemological capture. When research frameworks are shaped by funders’ assumptions about what sustainability means and how it should be measured, scholarship may inadvertently function as another civilizing meta-mechanism. It documents gaps, proposes refinements, and lends academic legitimacy to corporate programs without questioning the value relations that produce unsustainability. CVT offers resources for maintaining analytical independence precisely because its normative grounding lies outside capital’s self-understanding. CVT distinguishes True Value from Fetish Value and provides criteria rooted in commoning rather than accumulation. This enables researchers to ask questions that corporate-aligned frameworks structurally cannot—not whether sustainability programs meet their stated targets, but whether those targets serve life-supporting relations; not how to improve corporate sustainability performance, but why such performance systematically fails to reverse decommonization. For food systems scholarship to contribute to genuine transformation rather than sophisticated legitimation, it requires frameworks capable of this critical distance.

6. Conclusions

Through systematic analysis of how corporate programs decommonize the four commoning causes, this article demonstrated why such programs, regardless of stated intentions, cannot function as genuine game changers in food system transformation. By tracing reification, fetishization, and appropriation across all four causes, the analysis revealed a structural coherence that existing critical traditions, each illuminating important dimensions of the problem, have not captured in integrated form. The analysis showed that corporate sustainability programs systematically reify producers’ knowledge and skills into proprietary data, fetishize platforms and brands as sources of innovation, and appropriate creative capacity as corporate assets, while agricultural labor remains invisible and precarious beneath ethical sourcing claims. Living ecological processes are converted into tradeable metrics, with carbon markets and ecosystem service schemes functioning to financialize nature while enabling continued degradation. Platforms fragment (more than) human convivial relationships by simulating connection, all while capturing the value inherent in those social bonds. Most consequentially, the transformative potential of movements for food sovereignty, agroecology, and regenerative agriculture is appropriated through corporate programs that capture the language of transformation while foreclosing genuinely alternative futures.

Thus, the question facing food system transformation is not whether corporate sustainability programs can be made more effective but whether movements for genuine alternatives can build sufficient power to challenge the decommonization processes that corporate programs protect. CVT suggests that answering this question requires clarity about what is at stake: not merely the gap between sustainability rhetoric and reality, but the systematic perversion of the commoning causes upon which all life depends.

The multi-trillion-dollar annual externalities [21], the systematic gap between regenerative rhetoric and operational commitment [39], and the continued externalization of costs onto ecosystems, workers, and future generations are not failures of corporate sustainability but evidence of its successful function as a civilizing meta-mechanism. Corporate programs sustain unsustainability by making it appear manageable, deferring the structural changes that genuine transformation would require while capturing the legitimacy of sustainability discourse for continued accumulation. Corporate sustainability programs sustain the unsustainable. Genuine transformation requires sustaining the commons.

CVT offers more than critique. By distinguishing True Value from Fetish Value and identifying the commoning causes upon which genuine flourishing depends, the framework provides orientation for transformative action. The path beyond corporate sustainability leads not through better corporate programs but through the defense and extension of genuine commons: farmer-led agroecology, food sovereignty movements, worker-driven social responsibility, community land trusts, and democratic food governance. Whether and how they succeed in doing so under sustained pressure from decommonization requires the kind of detailed comparative inquiry that this theoretical analysis could not undertake, but it can now inform.

CVT’s analysis points toward a transformation that is neither purely prefigurative nor purely legislative but necessarily dual [28]. From below, movements must build and expand commons-based practices such as collective land stewardship, farmer-governed knowledge networks, and seed and food commons. These should function not as isolated alternatives alongside the dominant system but as expanding domains of re/commonization whose scope progressively displaces decommonized relations.

From above, serious political engagement is required to secure legislative and institutional shifts that structurally constrain decommonization. This means redirecting public agricultural investment away from corporate-led digitalization toward agroecological commons, restructuring intellectual property regimes that enable the appropriation of collective knowledge, and dismantling the regulatory frameworks through which corporate sustainability programs acquire the authority of civilizing meta-mechanisms. Neither dimension suffices alone.

Prefigurative alternatives without political transformation remain vulnerable to capture, while legislative reform without grassroots commonization risks reproducing decommonization in new institutional forms. The critical test is whether re/commonization expands in scope, whether it strengthens creativity, liveability, conviviality, and alterity across widening domains, rather than remaining a contained sector coexisting with, and ultimately subordinated to, the prevailing value regime [28,122]. Testing this proposition through sustained engagement with actual movements and communities is the necessary next step.