Agricultural Innovation Systems in Precarious Environments: Distressed or Untouched?

In recent years, environments of agri-food systems have significantly shifted. Climate change, a pandemic, and geopolitical conflicts have emphasized the vulnerability of natural resources, agricultural production, and agri-food chains. In light of these multiple crises, food security and the resilience and competitiveness of agricultural systems have received increasing attention and have become core issues on policy agendas. We are interested in the consequences of these disruptive contextual changes for innovation processes in the agri-food sector, more precisely, digital agriculture in pasture-based farming. How do major environmental shifts translate to innovation system dynamics? Conceptually, the literature provides promising points of departure for an investigation of system-environment relations in innovation processes. The analysis of innovation systems has shown that not only system structures but also their functions matter for understanding innovation pathways as well as their success (Hekkert, Suurs, Negro, Kuhlmann, & Smits, 2007). This allows for inquiring system-environment interactions also in the context of agricultural innovation systems, e.g. by boundary spanning through networks (Klerkx, Aarts, & Leeuwis, 2010). We expect that a guidance of the search for digital agriculture solutions might be another candidate function for translating contextual perturbation. More recently, the innovation system literature, including agricultural innovation systems, has started to address the role of missions, i.e. strategic goals addressing specific problems, in innovation processes enabling some purposes and pathways while constraining others (Hekkert, Janssen, Wesseling, & Negro, 2020; Klerkx & Begemann, 2020). We argue that mission orientations are also potential transmitters for environmental shifts reflecting missions’ successful geneses, attention cycles, and discursive contestations. In order to investigate function- and mission-related consequences of new agendas in innovation system environments, this study draws on the case of precision livestock farming technology. Being involved in the development of such technology in co-creation processes in German grassland farming regions, we follow an action research methodology based on the system intervention of jointly developing these innovations with local practitioners between 2020 and 2025. Longitudinal qualitative data on the needs and expectations regarding the technology collected in group discussions, participatory workshops and field trials allows to map changes in the innovation systems in the period characterized by contextual perturbations. This enables us to empirically assess whether and how environmental shifts translate to innovation system dynamics. We discuss implications for the future of German pasture-based farming and avenues of innovation system research. References Hekkert, M. P., Janssen, M. J., Wesseling, J. H., & Negro, S. O. (2020). Mission-oriented innovation systems. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 34, 76-79. Hekkert, M. P., Suurs, R. A. A., Negro, S. O., Kuhlmann, S., & Smits, R. E. H. M. (2007). Functions of innovation systems: A new approach for analysing technological change. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 74(4), 413-432. Klerkx, L., Aarts, N., & Leeuwis, C. (2010). Adaptive management in agricultural innovation systems: The interactions between innovation networks and their environment. Agricultural Systems, 103(6), 390-400. Klerkx, L., & Begemann, S. (2020). Supporting food systems transformation: The what, why, who, where and how of mission-oriented agricultural innovation systems. Agricultural Systems, 184, 102901.