Why do high-quality olives fail to yield high-value oil? Cultural lag, convention mismatch, and the quality paradox: Cultural lag, convention mismatch, and the quality paradox

Mediterranean smallholder olive oil production exhibits a recurring empirical puzzle: regions endowed with high-quality cultivars, favorable climatic conditions, and substantial cultivation areas systematically underperform their biophysical potential in premium-oriented markets. This study asks under what socio-demographic and structural conditions such high-potential territories fail to convert that potential into sustainable, high-value output, using Bozdoğan (Aydın, Türkiye) as an analytically instructive case. We mobilize a citizen science design—36 farmer citizen scientists conducted 60 in-depth interviews with local producers in 2024, complemented by 15 researcher-led triangulation interviews with key stakeholders. The study develops three interlocking contributions. First, against the standard deficit model of sustainability communication, we show that farmers’ economistic framing of sustainability coexists with fine-grained environmental awareness and is best read as a situated coping discourse under livelihood precarity rather than as a symptom of knowledge deficit. Second, we formalize the concept of the “quality paradox”—the chronic disjuncture between quality potential and market-recognized quality—through a dual framework combining cultural lag and convention theory. Third, we reposition the decline of communal harvest practices as a social reproduction crisis whose erosion of intergenerational tacit knowledge is itself a generative mechanism of the quality paradox rather than an supplementary context. A partial resolution pathway emerges in the form of women and young entrepreneurs who are convention-competent though their capacity to scale the transition depends on cooperative institutional platforms largely absent in the present setting. The findings specify the limits of technology and certification-focused interventions and argue for pedagogical, cooperative-institutional, and social-reproductive support for convention-enrolment in Mediterranean smallholder systems undergoing demographic restructuring.