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We witness a promotion of hybrid partnerships, where actors with different competences and resources collaborate for smallholder inclusive value chain development. To better understand the functioning of these partnerships, we used institutional theory and studied the context of a global and emerging regional food value chains in Ghana, the blending of logics by key actors in Innovation Platforms and Public Private Partnerships, and their effect on value chain relations of smallholder farmers. In the global value chain of cocoa, partnerships adhered to ‘green revolution’ and ‘free-market’ logics, and provided all farmers material support. In the more informally organised regional food sector, local executing partners selectively coupled their logics with those of poor smallholders, who rely on low-input agriculture and solidarity logics to make ends meet. This improved the position and transaction costs of smallholders to participate in the value chain. Hence, it is more likely for partnerships to create smallholder inclusive governance in informally organised regional food value chains, than highly structured global value chains controlled by international buyers. To gain insight in the variety of political effects this triggers in different social–historical shaped farmer communities, households and actors, we recommend complementary local research from a critical institutional perspective.

Digital technologies are often seen as an opportunity to enable sustainable futures in agriculture and rural areas. However, this digital transformation process is not inherently good as it impacts on many aspects (e.g. economic, environmental, social, technological, institutional) and their relations. The Responsible Research and Innovation approach calls for a better understanding and anticipation of the often unknown impacts. To meet this aim we have developed a framework that allows to gain insight on the relations between the social, the cyber and the physical, i.e. a Socio-Cyber-Physical System and have described conditions for a successful digital transformation of such a system. These are design of, and creating access to digital technologies, and navigating system complexity. This framework allows for a better problematisation of digital transformation and has been illustrated through an example of digital dairy farming. It supports an enhanced understanding of moral responsibilities regarding digital transformation, fitting within the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, as well as the succinct step of understanding who is responsible or accountable for the identified (positive or negative) impacts, i.e. responsibilisation.

Innovation platforms (IPs) that support agricultural innovation to enable transition processes towards more sustainable agriculture provide a space where conflicts of interest among actors in the existing agricultural system (the so called incumbent regime) may play out. Sometimes these conflicts over how actors will benefit from an action are not revealed until actors are brought together. However, a barrier to change occurs when IP actors use their existing power to mobilise resources to influence if and how individual and collective interests are aligned. In the context of agricultural innovation and transitions, this paper uses the power in transitions framework (Avelino and Wittmayer, 2016), along with analytical perspectives on conflicts and role perceptions, to understand how consciously staging or revealing conflicts of interest among IP actors changed role perceptions and power relations among these actors. The paper explores this topic in two IPs addressing agricultural production and sustainability challenges in New Zealand's agricultural sector. Conflicts were staged in IPs when one group of actors mobilised resources that enabled them to move existing power relations from one-sided, to synergistic or a mutual dependency. This enabled conflicts to be acknowledged and solved. In contrast, conflicts were not staged when actors mobilised resources to maintain antagonostic power relations. Our cases demontrate that staging conflicts to change actors' role perceptions is an important intermediary step to forming new power relations in the agricultural system. Our findings highlight the need for IP theory to conceptualise power relations in IPs as context specific, dynamic and a force shaping outcomes, rather than solely a force exerted by actors in the incumbent regime over IP actors.

Growing empirical evidence suggests that innovation platforms can be effective in enhancing agricultural research impact by creating an enabling environment for scaling of innovations such as novel technologies, practices and busines models . However, efforts to understand how these innovation platforms operate to scale innovations are insufficient. Such knowledge is critical for improving the design of agricultural innovation systems, specifically within the context of a rising interest in the innovation platform approach to support the transformation of agriculture across Africa. This paper investigates the scaling approaches employed by innovation platforms established in Rwanda. The study focused on four innovation platforms created as part of the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Program and analysed their activities and the resulting scaling outcomes. The findings show that two approaches can be effectively combined during the intervention; (1) the innovation process that resembles a traditional, linear approach of finding short-term solutions to specific problems (push approach) and (2) the network building process where platforms employed multi-level, transdisciplinary processes (pull approach). In two areas, the platform activities appeared to have contributed to increased revenues of farmers. The alignment of the innovation platform activities with political agendas or broadly, the extent to which the scaling strategy considers the existing conducive context is shown to play a critical role in the scaling process. The study shows that a balanced combination of both push and pull approaches and a strategic linkage between the platform activities and external development – government policies and interventions – are critical for a productive agricultural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The findings also indicate that the scaling processes require a “protected space” to materialise, and the scaling approach needs flexibility to accommodate the complexity of each innovation.

Previous approaches to improve soil and water management in the Ethiopian highlands have achieved marginal success. An integrated approach to rainwater management (RWM) has been piloted to address interrelated problems of land degradation, livestock feed shortage, and soil erosion, in an effort to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods. However, stakeholders' perceptions about the approach have not been documented. Using data from in-depth interviews, this study assesses stakeholders' knowledge, attitudes, skills and practices in the Diga, Jeldu and Fogera districts of Ethiopia. Our study finds gender differences in knowledge and application of integrated RWM strategies amongst farmers. Stakeholders interviewed appreciate fodder development because it directly addresses land degradation and livestock feed shortage, and provides extra benefits to the households. There are differences in successful RWM practices across the districts. Planners, researchers and policy makers engaged in innovation platforms have an increased understanding of the tools to engage multiple stakeholders in planning for RWM. However, inflexible extension approaches and other contextual issues limit wide-scale use of bottom-up approaches. We conclude that approaches to RWM that are holistic and engage diverse stakeholders foster the uptake of innovations. Awareness creation, collaboration, capacity development, incentives, monitoring, political will and favorable gender norms are vital to the process.

Trade globalisation and climate change pose new challenges for food security in Africa. To unlock smallholder productivity, more understanding is needed of the institutional context and the role of development interventions, such as partnerships, in the food sector. This article proposes institutional logics as a theory and methodology for institutional diagnosis to gain insight into context-embedded negotiation and change processes created by project-based partnership interventions. We analyse the institutional logics of organisations active in the development of two value chains in Ghana to subsequently show how, in partnerships, these logics are negotiated in light of the objectives and interests of the intervention. The main findings are that donors, with their market and professionalisation logics, are quite influential, but many other development actors still adhere to principles of grassroots empowerment and social security. In the evolving partnership process, market logic remains strong, but coupled with institutional logics endorsing farmer empowerment and solidarity with the resource-poor. This is done in a process of bricolage in which field level implementers go against the dominant logic of project initiators: showing that newly introduced development logics are mitigated by an existing local structure fostering other development logics. The broader implication is that new development paradigms may need a considerable transition period to become mainstream. The concepts of institutional logics and bricolage as a diagnostic tool allow researchers to characterise the adherence to and blending of institutional logics by actors. This tool helps to understand the mobilisation strategy of the initiator and to follow the negotiation of logics that takes place amongst partners in partnerships. Detailed insights into the blending of potential partners’ logics, pathways of negotiation processes and the plausible outcomes enable development practitioners to strategically prepare and manage their collaborative interventions.

This paper compares lessons learned from nine studies that explored institutional determinants of innovation towards sustainable intensification of West African agriculture. The studies investigated issues relating to crop, animal, and resources management in Benin, Ghana, and Mali. The constraints addressed were agronomic or economic (e.g. low production, yield, quality, prices) and institutional (e.g. poor access to resources and constraining regulations) and were analysed using an array of research approaches. The studies showed that political ambitions to foster institutional change were often high (restoring the Beninese cotton sector and protecting Ghanaian farmers against fluctuating cocoa prices) and that the institutional change achieved was often remarkable. However, flexibility of institutions, co-evolution of technical and institutional change, and increased transparency are needed to make institutional change successful. The programme Convergence of Sciences – Strengthening Agricultural Innovation Systems encouraged interventions where needed and enabled researchers and stakeholders to acquire the change capacities required to identify the need and potential for change and to make change happen. More research is needed to design pathways towards sustainable intensification based on social and technological innovation. Policy-makers should create space for institutional experimentation and empower smallholder farmers in West Africa to create resilient, local food systems to feed burgeoning urban populations.

Increasingly, value chain approaches are integrated with multi-stakeholder processes to facilitate inclusive innovation and value chain upgrading of smallholders. This pathway to smallholder integration into agri-food markets has received limited analysis. This article analyses this integration through a case study of an ongoing smallholder dairy development programme in Tanzania. Value chain upgrading and innovation systems perspectives were combined in an analytical framework to interpret the findings, which show that multi-stakeholder processes enhance horizontal and vertical coordination but limit process and product upgrading. The main conclusion is that, although such processes may catalyze smallholder market inclusion, their effects are largely bounded by existing value chain structures (e.g. production system, fragmented markets), timeframe and how prevailing institutional constraints are addressed, which may constrain the intentions of such collaboration action. This calls attention to the starting points of value chain interventions and the socio-political dynamics that are part of multi-stakeholder processes.

Innovation as a policy goal, normative practice, and a conceptual framing of purposeful human activity, has received increasing attention. The question of what kinds of purposeful innovation might benefit smallholders in developing countries has been raised. This issue presents and analyses the work of Innovation Platforms (IPs) established by the COS-SIS (Convergence of Sciences–Strengthening Innovation Systems) programme in nine agro-enterprise domains in West Africa, drawing on Theory Guided Process Inquiry data recorded through 2011-end 2013. Six papers synthesise individual IP experiences, complemented by a cross-case analysis of external influences on the IPs and their responses, a reflection on how well the IPs in Mali dealt with local conflicts, and an analysis of how the work of the IPs in Ghana led to changes in university curricula and in the researching practices of three leading agricultural institutes. An analysis of thirteen case studies from Kenya, Benin, and South Africa supported by the JOLISAA (Joint learning in and about Innovation Systems in African Agriculture) programme, adds further insights. Five general lessons are drawn, expressed as propositions that can be further tested against others’ experiences: (i) IPs can bring about significant socio-technical and institutional changes at a range of levels, and in a wide variety of agro-enterprise domains and contexts; (ii) the IPs are not isolated from nor independent of the networks of influence in which they are embedded; thus they cannot be treated as the sole causal agents of the changes accomplished; (iii) research that tracks the IPs’ work and performance provides evidence that enables the members to learn from experience and adjust activities in the light of effects; (iv) there is no blueprint for what an IP is nor a recipe for the processes by which such changes are brought about; the form, activities, and changes co-evolve with whatever is happening in the wider context; (v) field-based diagnosis of opportunity, evidence-based information-sharing and experimental exploration of pathways of change establish the legitimacy and influence of IPs.

The experiences synthesised in this article indicate how significant effects in two agricultural domains have been achieved by creating pathways for inter-dependent socio-technical and institutional changes, at a range of levels of action, governance and policy-making. The synthesis emphasizes the importance of co-learning, experimentation, and critical reflection among a wide network of ‘champions’ of transformational change on behalf of smallholder farmers and processors. It shows that innovation processes may involve actors along entire value chains, industry leaders at national level, or local level actors seeking to widen the space for change beyond their immediate circle of direct influence. While the research and development initiatives of the domains are shown to have been critical in identifying the constraints and opportunities of smallholders, and also to the effects documented, this was largely because the research effort converged around empirically grounded problems and opportunities identified. The information sought, and the solutions found useful, were determined by the members of innovation platforms that drove the processes of change.

In Benin, a combination of governmental programmes effectively stimulated rice intensification by providing relevant institutional arrangements such as subsidized seed, credit and a market outlet. In this paper, the authors investigate the institutional character of these programmes by unpacking the rules embedded in them and by showing how farmers mould, reject and change these rules or combine them with local rules – their practices of institutional bricolage. The authors show that the services provided by the programmes had great advantages for rice farmers, but they also had an exclusive character. Because of local bricolage practices, the programmes both affected rice production and helped the rice farmers to deal with conflicts over inequitable land allocation and discriminatory participation in canal cleaning. These findings contribute to discussion of the role of innovation platforms in the stimulation of institutional change and the provision of enabling conditions.

Oil palm is an important industrial, livelihood and food crop in Ghana. Smallholders produce the bulk of the palm fruits and small-scale processors, mainly women, produce most of the crude palm oil. Poor practices lead to a high proportion of free fatty acids in the crude palm oil and the processors thus cannot access remunerative national and international markets. Exploratory and diagnostic studies identified the absence of rules and regulations governing processing as a major factor. An innovation platform was convened and facilitated to remove the identified institutional constraints. Based on event tracing, this paper reports a study of the effects of the innovation platform's interventions and how these were achieved. Institutional entrepreneurs are shown to play important roles: they mobilised resources such as expertise, knowledge, access to information and high-level political power to influence small-scale processors to adopt alternative practices. The institutional changes observed are shown to arise in cooperation between traditional authorities (chiefs), the district legislature and authorities at the national level, who together institutionalised the experimental actions and processes taken in the study area. The institutional elements they most affected were: rules and regulations, the legitimacy of new practices and organisational arrangements, co-generation of knowledge, material resources, and the strategic and communication skills of key actors.

Previous approaches to improve soil and water management in the Ethiopian highlands have achieved marginal success. An integrated approach to rainwater management (RWM) has been piloted to address interrelated problems of land degradation, livestock feed shortage, and soil erosion, in an effort to improve the resilience of rural livelihoods. However, stakeholders' perceptions about the approach have not been documented. Using data from in-depth interviews, this study assesses stakeholders' knowledge, attitudes, skills and practices in the Diga, Jeldu and Fogera districts of Ethiopia. Our study finds gender differences in knowledge and application of integrated RWM strategies amongst farmers. Stakeholders interviewed appreciate fodder development because it directly addresses land degradation and livestock feed shortage, and provides extra benefits to the households. There are differences in successful RWM practices across the districts. Planners, researchers and policy makers engaged in innovation platforms have an increased understanding of the tools to engage multiple stakeholders in planning for RWM. However, inflexible extension approaches and other contextual issues limit wide-scale use of bottom-up approaches. We conclude that approaches to RWM that are holistic and engage diverse stakeholders foster the uptake of innovations. Awareness creation, collaboration, capacity development, incentives, monitoring, political will and favorable gender norms are vital to the process.