From 2013 to 2014, the FAO and the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) undertook a survey of innovative approaches that enable markets to act as incentives for the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. Through a competitive selection process, 15 cases from around the world provide insights into how small-scale initiatives that use sustainable practices have been driven by market demand to create innovations in the institutions that govern sustainable practices and market exchanges. These cases have responded to both local and distant consumers’ concerns about the qualities of the food that they eat. Through this study we learned that the initiatives rely upon social values to better adapt sustainable practices to local contexts while creating new market outlets for their products. Specifically, private sector and civil society actors are leading partnerships with the public sector to build market infrastructure, integrate sustainable agriculture into private and public education and extension programmes, and ensure the exchange of transparent information about market opportunities. The results are: (i) system innovations that allow new rules for marketing and assuring the sustainable qualities of products; (ii) new forms of organization that permit actors to play multiple roles in the system (e.g. farmer and auditor, farmer and researcher, consumer and auditor, consumer and intermediary); (iii) new forms of market exchanges such as box schemes, university kiosks, public procurement or systems of seed exchanges; (iv) new technologies for sustainable agriculture (e.g. effective micro-organisms, bio-pesticides, soil analysis techniques, personal protective equipment). We have found that the public sector plays a key role in providing legitimate political and physical spaces for multiple actors to jointly create and share sustainable agricultural knowledge, practices and products.