Governing innovations in grassland farming: How do institutional rules shape socio-technical transition pathways?

Practices of pasture-based livestock farming have evolved over millennia, but are currently confronted with emerging technologies referred to as precision or digital agriculture (Klerkx, Jakku, & Labarthe, 2022). For grasslands, these innovations particularly include remote sensing, virtual fencing and decision support applications. Such novel niche technologies need to prevail against resistance of existing technologies, cultures, markets and regulations (Geels, 2020). Respective socio-technical transition paths already show variance across types of technology, agricultural sectors and national contexts, e.g. an uneven success of virtual fencing in European countries. Existing governance arrangements can facilitate or hamper transitions, but studying them does not necessarily capture grassland management practices, value chains and coordination within rural communities. How do institutional settings of pasture-based livestock farming influence the mainstreaming of digital agriculture innovations? To address this question, we turn to the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (Ostrom, 2005) with its concept of action situations, which can enrich policy and governance analyses (Schütze, Thiel, & Villamayor-Tomas, 2022). Drawing on recent work on design patterns (Dunlop, Kamkhaji, Radaelli, & Taffoni, 2021) and institutional configurations (Bazzan, Candel, Daugbjerg, & Pecurul, 2022), we expect combinations of rules in specific contexts to make a difference for socio-technical transition pathways. We investigate two regional cases of grassland farming in Germany, in which practitioners have engaged in a co-creation of precision grassland farming technologies in living labs over four years. Based on policy documents, group discussions and expert interviews, we reconstruct relevant action situations and sets of rules. This allows to comparatively assess their consequences for socio-technical transition pathways of digital innovations in grassland farming. References: Bazzan, G., Candel, J., Daugbjerg, C., & Pecurul, M. (2022). Identifying institutional configurations for policy outcomes: A comparison of ecosystem services delivery. Policy Studies Journal, 51(3), 501-527. Dunlop, C. A., Kamkhaji, J. C., Radaelli, C. M., & Taffoni, G. (2021). Measuring design diversity: A new application of Ostrom's rule types. Policy Studies Journal, 50(2), 432-452. Geels, F. W. (2020). Micro-foundations of the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions: Developing a multi-dimensional model of agency through crossovers between social constructivism, evolutionary economics and neo-institutional theory. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 152, 119894. Klerkx, L., Jakku, E., & Labarthe, P. (2022). A review of social science on digital agriculture, smart farming and agriculture 4.0: New contributions and a future research agenda. NJAS: Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, 90-91(1), 1-16. Ostrom, E. (2005). Understanding Institutional Diversity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schütze, N., Thiel, A., & Villamayor-Tomas, S. (2022). Coordination across the policy cycle: Uncovering the political economy of river basin management in Spain. Environmental Science & Policy, 135, 182-190.