Enacting overlapping exchanges to address market concerns: Evidence on sustainable and conventional coffee markets in Uganda

Abstract

This article tackles an underexplored topic in the Market Studies literature—the enactment of exchange practices in overlapping markets. Based on an ethnographic study, the article examines a contested market space in which sustainable and conventional coffee buyers compete to enact exchanges with farmers. At the center of this competition are farmers, whose subsistence challenges heavily influence the choice of market(s) they operate in. An Exchange Entanglements framework for analyzing overlapping exchanges is developed, which accounts for market concerns, calculative power asymmetries, and the (re)configuration of market entities. The article builds our understanding of how exchanges are enacted to account for concerns in overlapping markets, and develops a characterization of overlapping market exchanges. It questions the extent to which dominant market actors can address farmers’ subsistence challenges, and highlights the problematic challenge of enacting concerned markets that serve marginalized market actors.