The thesis addresses the question of what circumstances and behaviours encourage farmers to cooperate and, more importantly, discourage them from doing so. The message from CAP policy makers to farmers is that a competitive and sustainable rural area is also one in which they cooperate economically and environmentally. The ethnographic research focused on farmers' moral sentiments, experiences and judgements as well as the culture of cooperation. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews with farmers, agricultural advisors and others were conducted during the long-term field research in Goričko. The material obtained was analysed using a moral economy approach, which deals with the question of how people morally evaluate economic relationships and institutions and what moral impact economic activities have on people's well-being. The study participants associated their previous market cooperation, land use and sales, and the subsidy system with sentiments of moral injustice and therefore perceived the formation of possible future cooperative relationships with other farmers as harmful to their well-being. This and their belief that they could not influence power relations in the food chain through market cooperation had an important influence on their judgement that formal cooperation was impossible and pointless. Research has shown that the pursuit of self-interest and benefit is not the only motivation and rationalisation in economic relationships, but that moral sentiments, judgements and experiences also play an important role.
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