Consumer driven governance for sustainable rice systems through traceability and quality upgrading in Indonesia

Abstract Sustainable food systems require a stronger alignment between consumer preferences, market governance, and production practices, particularly in staple food systems such as rice. In Indonesia, weak coordination, limited traceability, and inconsistent quality standards constrain the capacity of rice value chains to respond to increasingly differentiated consumer demands. This study develops a consumer-informed decision-support framework for sustainable rice value chain upgrading by integrating interpretive structural Modelling (ISM) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Consumer preference attributes were identified and validated through consumer and value-chain actor inputs, while expert judgement was used to model structural relationships and prioritize strategic interventions. The results show that packaging-related trust cues function as relatively strong structural drivers in the MICMAC analysis, while variety origin, sensory quality, and rice quality grade are central consumer-facing attributes linked to trust, perceived value, and quality-based differentiation, respectively. AHP prioritization identified variety-origin traceability as the highest-ranked strategy, with a global weight of 0.4372, followed by standardized rice grading and quality control protocols, with a global weight of 0.2405. These findings suggest that consumer-oriented traceability and quality upgrading can provide a practical governance pathway for improving transparency, coordination, and market differentiation in Indonesia’s rice sector. Rather than claiming direct sustainability impacts, this study offers a decision-support framework for designing transparent, quality-oriented, and inclusive staple food value chains.