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Purpose: Digital extension is widely embraced in African agricultural development, promising unprecedented outcomes and impact. Especially phone-based services attract attention as tools for effective and efficient agricultural extension. To date, assessments of digital extension services are generally ex-post in nature, thus consideration of users and broader systems occurs once an intervention is broadly identified. However, early understanding of user needs, readiness, and relevant context is a prerequisite for successful adoption and sustainable use of digital extension services. We conducted an ex-ante assessment of user readiness (UR) for phone-based services. Design/Methodology/Approach: We developed an ex-ante framework to assess UR, considering capabilities, opportunities, and motivations of targeted users. The case study of Rwandan banana farmers served to verify the UR framework, using survey data from 690 smallholder farmers. Findings: Findings demonstrate limited capacity to access and use phone-based extension services, especially those requiring a smartphone, and a mismatch between expected UR and actual UR, current capabilities and opportunities. Findings provide entry points for designing suitable digital extension projects and interventions, suggesting a need for capacity building. Practical implications: The UR-framework provided understanding about current limitations in farmer readiness for digital extension. This ex-ante approach to explore UR before designing digital interventions for African farmers is recommended. It points at the importance of embedding digital technologies into existing practices and creating blends of ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ or 'high-tech' and 'low-tech'. Theoretical implications: The UR-framework provides a structured approach to developing pre-intervention insights about users and use-context, supporting informed strategizing and decision-making about digital extension. It is a relevant addition to existing readiness frameworks, participatory design methods, and ex-post intervention performance assessments, as part of a balanced readiness level assessment. Originality/Value: This is the first ex-ante assessment of UR for digital extension services in an African context, and the first attempt to analyse Rwandan farmers’ readiness for digital extension services.

The concept of inclusive innovation has become widely embraced in the agricultural domain and promises to overcome traditional innovation paradigms by emphasizing more balanced, sustainable, and just human-environmental relations. Indigenous and local knowledge play an increasingly important role in debates about inclusive innovation, highlighting the diversity of relevant actors and marginalized perspectives. At the same time, the positioning of Indigenous and local knowledge in innovation processes remains ambiguous and contested. This article addresses this positioning in the context of inclusive agricultural innovations by reviewing 65 publications through iterative inductive coding. The qualitative review generates a conceptual framework that distinguishes five different modes relating innovation processes to Indigenous and local knowledge. These modes differ in locating innovations in endogenous, exogenous, or hybrid knowledge production. Furthermore, they also differ in their conceptualizations of Indigenous and local knowledge as dynamic or static. The resulting matrix provides resources for navigating the complex epistemic and political relations between knowledge systems in the agricultural domain.

This study is focused on unsustainable agri-food systems, especially intensive livestock farming and its resulting environmental harms. Specifically we focus on the development of technologies that seek to mitigate these environmental harms. These technologies are generally developed as incremental innovations in response to government regulation. Critics of these technological solutions allege that these developments legitimate unsustainable food production systems and are incapable of supporting agri-food systems transformation. At the same time, technology developers and other actors seek to present these technologies as the legitimate solution to agri-environmental harms. Our study seeks to explore the perceptions and constructions of legitimacy for technologies that are developed to reduce ammonia emissions in intensive livestock farming in Flanders (Belgium). We use a qualitative case study, employing semi-structured interviews and workshops, with technology developers of ammonia-emission reducing technologies and stakeholders in the intensive livestock farming industry in Flanders. What our study shows is that technologies developed to reduce emissions are dependent on regulative legitimacy. The normative and cognitive legitimacy of these technologies is lacking, both due to ties to the intensive livestock industry and due to uncertainty over the performance of these technologies. With the delegitimation of intensive livestock farming, the legitimacy of these technologies is also under threat. In response, technology developers are looking to (re-)construct this legitimacy through knowledge claims over the performance of their technologies. We show several ways for other actors to deal with this, centred on either re-legitimising technologies to maintain the status quo, or to contest these knowledge claims and use them to disrupt path dependencies.

Based on a mixed-methods study involving triad tasks and ethnobiological models, we analyze local categories and knowledge of key ethnospecies of fish exploring partial overlaps between artisanal fishers’ and academic knowledge in a fishing community in northeast Brazil. We argue that fishers’ and academic knowledge overlaps may provide common ground for transdisciplinary collaboration, while their partiality requires reflection on epistemological and ontological differences. Here, we show how knowledge of artisanal fishers can complement academic knowledge and bring about tensions that need to be addressed through intercultural dialogue. By integrating a general philosophical framework of partial overlaps with a mixed-methods study on fishers’ knowledge, we show how ethnobiology can contribute to reflective and empirically-grounded transdisciplinary practices.

Excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer in China and its adverse effects on agricultural production have been a national and global concern. In addition to massive public initiatives to promote sustainable farm practices, grass-rooted innovations are emerging in the niche, many of which take the forms of information and communication technologies (ICT) and digital services. This study examines the effects of ICT-based extension services provided by an entrepreneurial startup on adopting sustainable farming practices. We found no significant reduction in N-fertilizer use for wheat production. But the ICT-based services promoted farmers to adapt N-fertilizer use towards site-specific management. The business model of the entrepreneurial venture faces great challenges in becoming participatory and financially sustainable.

Assemblage thinking is an increasingly influential approach in critical studies of food and farming, and partic-ularly in research on new agri-food technology such as precision agriculture (PA). This research is important in highlighting the distributed forms of power and agency through which farming worlds are assembled, and what these engender for more sustainable and equitable farming futures. However, to date, there has been limited attention to assembling PA from the perspective of farmers, what Legun and Burch (2021) refer to as 'deliberative assembling'. This paper contributes to knowledge in this area by applying post actor network theoretical work to investigate across case studies in Australia, the Netherlands and France, the forms of tinkering by which farmers attempt to make PA workable, and what these engender for farmer agency. Through our analysis, we show that much of the tinkering by farmers is aimed at holding together their own priorities, routines, and experiences with practices inscribed in PA technology, such as dependence on commercial advice, data-driven knowledge, and commitment to a single technological platform/company. Integral to this tinkering work are support networks that include agronomists, advisors, machinery dealers and/or farmer discussion groups. We argue that whilst these support networks are critical to holding together different practices, and making PA workable, they also play a more diverse and nuanced role in PA implementation than what has previously been recognised. Our case studies provide insights into three key forms of tinkering used by farmers in navigating support networks to make PA workable - disconnection, experimentation and trial-and-error, and trade-offs and compromises - and the specific distributions of agency which these tinkering practices engender. In conclusion, we argue that a tinkering lens provides a valuable approach for enabling agri-food scholars to tease out in greater depth delib-erative assembling practices and how these variously open-up or foreclose options for farmers in making PA workable.

Gene drives are potentially ontologically and morally disruptive technologies. The potential to shape evolutionary processes and to eradicate (e.g. malaria-transmitting or invasive) populations raises ontological questions about evolution, nature, and wilderness. The transformative promises and perils of gene drives also raise pressing ethical and political concerns. The aim of this article is to arrive at a better understanding of the gene drive debate by analysing how ontological and moral assumptions are coproduced in this debate. Combining philosophical analysis with a critical reading of the gene drive literature and an ethnographic study of two leading research groups, the article explores the hypothesis that the development of and debate about gene drives are characterized by a particular intervention-oriented mode of coproduction. Based on the results of this exploration, we highlight the need for a broadening of the perspective on gene drives in which empirical, moral, and ontological concerns are addressed explicitly in their interplay rather than in (disciplinary) isolation from each other.

The agricultural innovation systems (AIS) in many Sub-Sahara African (SSA) countries lack the structural capacities to support smallholder-inclusive innovation. Multi-stakeholder Innovation Platforms (IPs) have been proposed as systemic instruments to improve the functioning and building of the structural capacities of the Innovation System (IS). This article studies the role of state-initiated IPs and multilevel Agriculture Development Partners Linkage Advisory Councils (ADPLACs) in tackling the systemic problems of the AIS in Tigray, Ethiopia. After studying policy documents, in-depth interviews were conducted with various participants of ADPLACs. The results show that the contribution of ADPLAC in building the structural capacities is limited; due to the absence of some important enabling factors and the presence of several intertwined constraints. The major finding of this study is that the interlocked nature of the systemic problems constrained the functioning of the platform, indicating the need for combining IPs with other systemic instruments, to overcome the lock-in.

The Agricultural Innovation System perspective highlights the importance of interaction for learning and innovation, but so far little research is done on the cultural differences of farmers and the effect this has on interaction, knowledge sharing and innovation. We took a cultural perspective to better understand local interaction, knowledge sharing and learning dynamics, and uptake of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) in Bangladesh where the Department of Agricultural Extension organizes Farmer Field Schools (FFS) for IPM. However, the success of the FFS approach at farmer level is quite diverse. We coupled an ethnographic study with an analysis, based on Cultural Theory, to identify the cultural pattern of behaviour, underlying preferences of social organization, and the effect this has on pest management innovation in two farmer communities. Findings showed that in one village with strong group solidarity, farmers tended to share knowledge in a wide network, and started to apply IPM while reducing pesticide use. In the other community, individualism and fatalism prevailed and farmers only shared knowledge within their close network, distrusted outsiders and continued to rely on pesticides. We conclude that it is important to include cultural studies in cross-disciplinary research and design of local innovation interventions.

In the context of emerging digital advisory services that can make a potential difference in sustainable farming practices, this article analyzes the connection between on-farm human interaction and digital advice. Based on an experimental case from China’s largest ever national research initiative on reducing agrochemical use in agricultural production, this study found that introducing university facilitators to promote ICT-based advisory services is conducive to site-specific fertilizer use. Through interactions with farmers, the facilitator complemented digital advisory services to achieve optimal N-fertilizer use in maize production. Digital service providers favoured large farms and usually would not service smallholder farmers, thus limiting the potential of digital advisory services. A main theoretical implication is that digital technology should not be completely relied upon because it may only give part of the answer. A human facilitator still plays an important role in integrating new technologies in interaction with farmers. Human advisory services can interpret or translate data to improve farmers’ decision-making, going beyond the advisory capacity of ICT technology. This is an important policy implication for China regarding its national research policies on agricultural sustainability and digital advisory services, and also calls for further research on interactions between digital and human advisory services.

This study aims to provide insights into the challenges that home and international students experience when collaborating in mixed groups. A selection of 261 reflective journals written by students as part of the Intercultural Communication Skills course at a Dutch university in the domains of life sciences and engineering was analyzed. These journals were written by 210 Dutch (= home) students, 22 European (non-Dutch) students, and 29 Asian students. The quantitative analysis showed that the main challenges were group management, contribution to group work, and feedback. Asian students reported challenges related to feedback significantly more often compared to Dutch and other European students. The qualitative analysis showed that Dutch, other European, and Asian students’ concerns differed in terms of interaction and communication styles stemming from their various cultures of learning.

Evaluations of private sector development programmes look at what changed to the workings of the system, and whether these changes are scalable, resilient, and sustainable. We present an evaluation lens that primarily qualifies changes to the systemic nature of food provisioning in markets. It converts theoretical frameworks into ‘antennae’ receptive to early signs of systemic effects of inclusive agribusiness that fosters food and nutrition security. The tools for this theory-informed approach were developed and applied in 2SCALE, a Dutch-funded programme aiming to incubate inclusive agribusiness and contribute to food and nutrition security goals in Africa. The article reflects on what to monitor to detect early signs of systemic effects and how monitoring can be embedded in unfolding business and partnering processes. It concludes that taking a theory-informed approach gives directionality to strategising and planning, and enhances capacities of partners in inclusive business projects to lead actions towards realising systemic effects.

Based on a concept for demand-orientation in seed systems, we characterized Nigeria’s cassava (Manihot esculenta) seed system from national to local level and farmers’ demand in three study sites. Interviews with seed-system actors explained their roles for supply-side functions. Focus group discussions and a survey described multiple aspects of farmers’ demand. Our findings show that the national agriculture development program alone did not have the capacity to supply farmers with sufficient seed of desired varieties. Seed exchange between farmers and informal seed sellers contributed to the distribution of seed and new varieties. The presence of seed sellers and farmers’ demand for cassava seed varied between the three study sites, farmer types and gender. We conclude that informal seed sellers and village seed entrepreneurs have a potential to respond to farmers’ heterogeneous demands. However, without recurrent demand for specialized seed production or continuous support from the formal system, they do not reach underserved markets.

Het idee van wetenschapscommunicatie is verbreed, en omvat de articulatie van kennisvragen in de samenleving. Aan de hand van vijf mini-case-studies worden veronderstellingen hierbij kritisch onder de loep genomen, en wordt aangetoond dat het uitermate lastig is om middels vraagarticulatie de toepasbaarheid van kennis te vergroten. Voorgesteld wordt om kennisvoorziening en dialogische wetenschapscommunicatie in te bedden in bestaande veranderingsinitiatieven en discours-coalities.

Growing sustainability demands on land have a high knowledge requirement across multiple scientific domains. Exploring networks can expose opportunities for targeting. Using mixed-methods combining social network analysis (SNA) and surveys, networks for key soil functions in case studies in Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands are explored. We find a diversity of contrasting networks that reflect local conditions, sustainability challenges and governance structure. Farmers were found to occupy a central role in the agri-environmental governance network. A comparison of the SNA and survey results indicate low acceptance of messages from many central actors indicating scope to better harness the network for sustainable land management. The source of the messages was important when it came to the implementation of farm management actions. Two pathways for enhanced farmer uptake of multi-functionality are proposed that have wider application are; to increase trust between farmers and actors that are agents of multi-functional messages and/or to increase the bundling or multi-functionality of messages (mandate) of actors trusted by farmers.

The African “youth” population is growing at a fast and steady pace, attracting attention from scholars, policymakers, and politicians. Yet, we know relatively little about this large and heterogeneous segment of the population. This paper presents data from 110 interviews and ten focus groups with youth engaged in commercial agriculture across all four regions of Uganda. Capitalising on this ethnographic data, we provide an analytical framework for studying complexity among the heterogeneous social category of youth agripreneurs. The aim of the paper is twofold: First, to reconcile anthropological studies that highlight the heterogeneity of African youth with demographic understandings of youth as a statistical category defined by an age bracket. Second, to advance an operational definition of youth that allows for more context-sensitive and tailored programmes. Our results suggest that while “youth” is an important category demographically, the opportunities and challenges faced by youths are often not related to age.

Transdisciplinary research challenges the divide between Indigenous and academic knowledge by bringing together epistemic resources of heterogeneous stakeholders. The aim of this article is to explore causal explanations in a traditional fishing community in Brazil that provide resources for transdisciplinary collaboration, without neglecting differences between Indigenous and academic experts. Semi-structured interviews were carried out in a fishing village in the North shore of Bahia and our findings show that community members often rely on causal explanations for local ecological phenomena with different degrees of complexity. While these results demonstrate the ecological expertise of local community members, we also argue that recognition of local expertise needs to reflect on differences between epistemic communities by developing a culturally sensitive model of transdisciplinary knowledge negotiation.

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.

Forests play a key role in a bio-based economy by providing renewable materials, mitigating climate change, and accommodating biodiversity. However, forests experience massive increases in stresses in their ecological and socioeconomic environments, threatening forest ecosystem services supply. Alleviating those stresses is hampered by conflicting and disconnected governance arrangements, competing interests and claims, and rapid changes in technology and social demands. Identifying which stresses threaten forest ecosystem services supply and which factors hamper their alleviation requires stakeholders' perceptions. Stakeholder-oriented stress tests for the supply of forest ecosystem services are therefore necessary but are not yet available. This perspective presents a roadmap to develop a stress test tailored to multiple stakeholders' needs and demands across spatial scales. We provide the Cascade and Resilience Rosetta, with accompanying performance- and resilience indicators, as tools to facilitate development of the stress test. The application of the stress test will facilitate the transition toward a bio-based economy in which healthy and diverse forests provide sustainable and resilient ecosystem services.

Originally conceptualized by the philosopher, Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice—unfair treatment of individuals and groups in knowledge-related and communicative practices—is increasingly being employed to delineate individual and collective injustice in healthcare, information sciences, education and sustainable development. Embedded in many other forms of social injustice and inequality, epistemic injustice is a particularly serious problem for sustainable development, undermining the global community's ability to deal with ‘wicked’ problems. Building on the more conceptually developed, philosophical framework of epistemic injustice and recent research from other fields, this article develops a holistic action-oriented framework of epistemic justice, namely fair treatment in knowledge-related and communicative practices, for sustainable development and beyond. It also adds to the current framework of individual and collective injustice by including a range of new insights on structural and systemic epistemic injustice, such as linguistic injustice and epistemicide.

PurposeTo interrogate the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development” that dominates international development circles, by applying a feminist critical discourse analysis that prioritizes women's situated experiences as local stories.Design/methodology/approachTwo existing frameworks for analysing women's entrepreneurship, namely the 5M (Brush et al., 2009) and the 8M (Abuhussein and Koburtay, 2021) frameworks, are used to examine the local stories of women in rural Ethiopia to provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”. The local stories are derived from 16 focus group discussions and 32 interviews.FindingsThe findings provide a counter-narrative to the grand narrative of “entrepreneurship for development”, evident in Ethiopia and in international development generally, while demonstrating larger structural issues at play. They challenge entrepreneurship's solely positive effects. While women recognize the benefits of having a business, particularly in terms of financial gains, empowerment and social recognition, they also highlight negative consequences, including uncertainty, concerns for their own personal safety, criticism, stress, limited social life and fear of indebtedness and poverty.Practical implicationsPolicymakers, scholars and development professionals are urged to reflect on the limitations of “entrepreneurship for development” and to consider the negative effects that promoting an acritical grand narrative of entrepreneurship could have on women's lives.Originality/valueThe article advances an innovative partnership between feminist analysis and established women's entrepreneurship frameworks to contest dominant assumptions in the fields of entrepreneurship and international development studies. It adds to the limited empirical evidence on women's entrepreneurial activity in Ethiopia, tests the adequacy of the 5M and 8M frameworks in the rural low-income context of Ethiopia, and proposes a 7+M framework as an alternative to study rural women's entrepreneurship in low and middle income countries.

Fragmented market intelligence is the major barrier to investment in Africa’s emerging seed markets, according to participants in our June 23rd conference session on An investor guide for Africa. There is significant demand for a service of assessing the attractiveness of emerging seed markets in Africa for (impact) investment. The service should go beyond collating relevant information from diverse sources, by interpreting it and making informed recommendations to (impact) investors. We intend for our report to offer a substantiated value proposition for an entrepreneur or institution interested in prototyping and anchoring this service. We do this with the view to increase intelligence on Africa’s emerging seed markets. This report shares what Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation has uncovered through research about seed market intelligence in Africa. The research has been conducted mostly online involving literature review, key informant interviews with 20 leaders in government, industry, science, and civil society and panel discussion about the actual intelligence and minimum viable product for a service they require in making investment decisions. Among them were respondents from: the African Union Commission; the regional economic community COMESA; national, regional, and multinational seed companies; development finance institutes and commercial lenders; international agricultural research institutes, other knowledge institutes, and consultants; the African Seed Trade Association (AFSTA); and an International NGO. The research revealed several useful platforms, indices, and reports offering data for indicators of relevance to investors. Sources of market intelligence for the entire African region are included in the report. However, each does not cover all countries and dimensions of interest. We assessed 12 of them and learned that The African Seed Access Index (TASAI), Access to Seeds Index of the World Benchmarking Alliance, and Enabling the Business of Agriculture index of the World Bank overlap in 17 countries where data from CAADP Biennial Reviews are also available. These countries across Western and Central, and Eastern and Southern Africa offer the most readily available information for making investment decisions. Our research also resulted in the convergence of multiple indicators around four categories. This includes those that assess: (i.) seed sector performance; (ii.) the potential absorption of crop harvests in outputs markets; (iii.) current progress against targets for development impact; and (iv.) other variables of the country context. Cascading from that level of aggregation are three topics (sub-categories) in each. For the seed sector these include indicators of seed demand, seed supply and seed regulatory function. For output markets these include the size or value of these markets, the level of investments made in farm productivity, and organization of producers in leveraging economies of scale. For impact these include different indicators of poverty reduction, food security and nutrition, and climate change adaptation and mitigation and biodiversity conservation, management, and use. And lastly, for country context these include demographics, political and economic stability, and infrastructure. A mosaic of data is available from the indices and other sources of information mentioned above. Important to our efforts to collate these data are their availability in the public domain. Our research offers a substantiated value proposition and minimum viable product for the service. What it falls short of doing is outlining a viable business model for anchoring this service in the seed sector. Should an entrepreneur or institution be interested to pilot the service in Africa, we advise that they thoroughly consider the business model, including partnerships and revenue streams. A critical resource (and cost in the model) includes expertise on seed, seed business, and/or seed systems. Without this knowledge, based on our determination of the minimum viable product, accurate interpretations of the data cannot be made reliably. Collation is not enough to inform investment decisions and (impact) investors are looking for qualitative recommendations as well. We offer some cues for the curation of these data.

This study is part of the overarching socio-economic impact analysis of fisheries project. The central research question is: What have been the economic impacts of the 2021 decommissioning scheme on Wadden Sea shrimp fishing licenses on the fishing cluster. By looking at the short-term effect with quantitative and qualitative data analysis and modelling, little economic effect of the decommissioning scheme on the fishing cluster has been observed. By increasing the effort of the remaining fleet, the effort on the Wadden Sea did not change significantly, lower catches were compensated by good shrimp prices with as a result a positive economic result in the year after the decommissioning. In the long term, the fishery is now limited with a number of licences around 20% lower than the prior number of active vessels, with no possibility of increasing again. Deze studie is een deelonderzoek van de overkoepelende sociaal-economische impactanalyse visserij. De centrale onderzoeksvraag is: Wat zijn de economische effecten van de 2021 saneringsregeling op de Waddenzee-garnalenvisserijvergunningen op het visserijcluster geweest? Door met kwantitatieve en kwalitatieve data- analyse en modellering te kijken naar het kortetermijneffect, is er weinig economisch effect van de sanering op het visserij cluster geobserveerd. Door een verhoogde inzet van de resterende vloot, is de inspanning op de Waddenzee niet significant veranderd en werden lagere vangsten door goede garnalenprijzen gecompenseerd met als gevolg een positief economisch resultaat in het jaar na de sanering. Op de lange termijn is de visserij nu beperkt met een aantal vergunningen dat rond de 20% lager is qua aantal actieve schepen, zonder mogelijkheid om het aantal te laten groeien.

CONTEXT: Digital technologies nowadays play a major role in innovation within the agri-food domain. The evolution of IT systems has currently arrived at a level that involves complex systems integration and business ecosystems in which many stakeholders in different roles are involved. A new paradigm for digital innovation is needed that copes with this increased complexity. OBJECTIVE: This paper presents an empirically informed framework for analysing and designing viable, sustainable digital innovation ecosystems in the agri-food domain. METHODS: The research is based on a series of European large-scale public-private innovation projects from 2011 to 2021 with a total budget of 73 M€. They involved hundreds of stakeholders that were developing a large number of digital solutions through which a digital innovation ecosystem for agri-food was formed. In a longitudinal study, a conceptual framework was used to analyse these projects and describe how the digital innovation ecosystem has developed. Lessons learnt are translated into a number of design principles and an organizational approach to foster digital innovation ecosystems in agri-food. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The conceptual framework consists of 6 key concepts: (i) innovation strategy, (ii) innovation organization, (iii) innovation network that contains (iv) the innovation process and (v) the innovation object and finally (vi) an innovation infrastructure. Along these 6 concepts, lessons learnt and in total 21 design principles are derived from analysing the projects forming a basis for the organizational framework. At the core of this framework is a lean multi-actor approach to trials and use case development interacting with a set of multidisciplinary activities: (i) developing a common technical collaboration infrastructure, (ii) identifying value streams with user engagement, (iii) engaging the right partners and stakeholders at the right time supported by strategic project planning and dynamic management. The most important conclusion is that effective, successful and quick use of appropriate IT in agri-food requires that actors should not be analysed in isolation from both their technological and business environment. Another consequence is that a ‘minimal viable ecosystem’ only emerges after considerable time, resources and ingenuity is invested and may require outside (government) intervention. SIGNIFICANCE: Results from this paper can be used both by public and private stakeholders to diagnose and improve digital innovation projects and develop viable, sustainable digital innovation ecosystems in agri-food.

Weak and inefficient institutional arrangements have been identified as a major cause of the slow pace of agricultural growth in developing countries. Institutions – the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction – play a significant role in Sustainable Crop Intensification (SCI) in Uganda. This study uses farmers' perceptions to assess institutions and their roles in SCI. We collected data from 135 rice and potato-producing households in Eastern and Southwestern regions of Uganda between January and February 2017. We used Focus Group Discussions to identify and categorize institutional typologies following which we asked households to evaluate several institutional aspects. Overall, institutional contributions to SCI were highly valued by farmers. Based on functional, organizational, and managerial obstacles, farmers perceived formal institutions to be ineffective while they perceived informal farmer's institutions to be the most relevant institutions as they provided financial resources that alleviated constraints to agricultural production and met livelihood needs. We found a lack of coordination between the micro, meso, and macro-level institutions, which then affected their institutional functionality to execute SCI. There is a need for innovation within existing institutions, and a status quo of institutional arrangements that would better respond to smallholders' needs.

Agroecological techniques (AET) have been recognized by many farmers, NGOs, and farmers’ organizations (FOs) as a promising solution for slowing down the persistent soil fertility degradation in West African drylands. In the context of Burkina, the promotion of AET is the result of the interactions between NGOs and farmers’ knowledge through the intermediation of FOs. Although numerous studies have highlighted the instrumental role of FOs in the dissemination of AET in Burkina, there are limited studies focusing on the historical dynamic of FOs’ involvement in the promotion of agroecology. To address this gap, this study aims to answer the following questions: why and how do FOs get involved in the promotion of agroecological techniques, and how do they define the term agroecology or agroecological techniques? A multiple case study approach was used to provide the answer to these questions. The results from the case studies reveal that the FOs’ promotion of AET is largely connected to their aim of fulfilling one of the following three goals: enhancing the productivity of commercial crops; improving the resilience of subsistence farmers; enhancing both the productivity of commercial crops and the resilience of subsistence farmers. The quest to achieve these goals explained their constant interaction with external partners to get the necessary assistance for the provision of agroecological support services to their farmers. Furthermore, the results of the study also reveal that the Farmers’ Organizations’ definitions of agroecology or agroecological terms are mostly associated with the interpretation of agroecology as a collective practice encompassing both economic and ecological aspects of Burkinabè agriculture. A broader insight is that while FOs can fulfill important roles in agroecology transitions this comes with diverse interpretations of agroecology, in which FOs facilitate the hybridization of existing farmers ’practices with those proposed by external actors. The study hence shows the complexity related to the local actors’ definitions of agroecological terms and the broader implication is that in the debate on agroecology transitions, these blended or hybrid forms of agroecology should receive more attention. Areas for future research include drivers of FOs choice making processes in how they approach agroecology, and subsequently the influence of FOs on the drivers of farmers’ decisions toward AET.

Original and thought-provoking, this Research Agenda investigates the many ways in which tourism is gendered. It outlines current thought and directions for future research, looking forward by imagining and challenging the ways that gender will continue to intersect with and impact on tourism, as well as looking back to trace the key developments and contributions in gendered thinking.

In dit rapport staan de resultaten en aanbevelingen van een pilotstudie waarin in opdracht van Rijkswaterstaat Water, Verkeer en Leefomgeving (namens het Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaatstaat) bepaald is of en hoe de door Wageningen University & Research ontwikkelde Litter-ID-methodiek kan bijdragen aan de landelijke monitoringstrategie van rivierafval, die ontwikkeld wordt vanuit Rijkswaterstaat.---This report contains the results and recommendations of a pilot project commissioned by Rijkswaterstaat Water, Traffic and the Environment (on behalf of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water) to determine if and how the Litter-ID methodology, developed by Wageningen University & Research, can contribute to the national monitoring strategy for riverine litter currently being developed by Rijkswaterstaat.

No Brasil, o estabelecimento da política de defeso não tem levado em conta os conhecimentos de pescadoresartesanais, que são, comumente, marginalizados e não reconhecidos perante às políticas públicas que os atingem.Em nossos estudos, encontramos uma marcada incompatibilidade entre o conhecimento de pescadores artesanaisdo estuário do rio Itapicuru, litoral norte da Bahia, sobre o período reprodutivo de algumas espécies marinhasutilizadas como recursos pesqueiros e os períodos de defeso estabelecidos em lei. Os conhecimentos dos pesca-dores sugerem que duas espécies de robalo bem como quatro espécies de camarão estão sendo protegidas emperíodos do ano dissonantes da época reprodutiva percebida pelos pescadores. Propomos, assim, uma mudançanos procedimentos de tomada de decisão subjacentes às legislações de defeso, assim como a revisão da legislaçãoespecífica para robalos e camarões, levando-se em conta o conhecimento de especialistas tradicionais. Especial-mente na formulação de novas políticas de defeso, consideramos fundamental a participação destes últimos. Paraalcançar uma compreensão mais robusta e precisa da situação, propomos colocar em diálogo o conhecimentocientífico acadêmico e os conhecimentos de pescadores artesanais, em uma abordagem de pesquisa participativa.Processos participativos como os que propomos aqui e, eventualmente, de coprodução do conhecimento, não sópermitem melhorar as práticas de gestão e conservação ambiental e formulação de políticas públicas, mas tam-bém podem desempenhar um papel de empoderamento para comunidades pesqueiras, assim como para outrospovos do campo e povos indígenas.

In Ecuador, farmers poorly adopt practices to manage potato seed degeneration. This could be related to the deficient understanding of the farmers’ capacity to experience seed degeneration and respond to it. We contribute to this understanding by answering: How do farmers experience seed degeneration?; What practices do farmers implement when their seed is degenerated?; and Is experiencing degeneration the pivotal factor determining how farmers replace their seed regardless their income? We analysed data collected in Ecuador through farmers’ focus group discussions, farmers’ surveys and interviews, and the Ecuadorian employment status survey. We found that approximately half of the farmers experienced degeneration. Farmers experienced it through low yields, change in seed appearance, crop weakening, and seed physiological problems. When farmers experienced degeneration, they replaced their seed, sought for technical advice, applied more agricultural inputs, or grew other crops. Income was an important trigger for farmers to change their seed replacement practices.

The Investment Theme organizes bi-annual Community Meeting. At the 2nd Community Meeting on the 8th of November 2022, a vision exercise was conducted. The vision exercise consisted of three parts, 1) individual reflection, 2) group discussion, 3) plenary feedback. In this document, the individual reflection is analyzed.

Qualitative data from a mixed-methods case study of the agroecological transition in Nicaragua. Field work performed in 2014 and 2016-2018. Data includes responses from interviews, a survey, workshop notes and results, and other types of data.

This study is part of the overarching socio-economic impact analysis of fisheries project. The central research question is: What have been the economic impacts of the 2021 decommissioning scheme on Wadden Sea shrimp fishing licenses on the fishing cluster. By looking at the short-term effect with quantitative and qualitative data analysis and modelling, little economic effect of the decommissioning scheme on the fishing cluster has been observed. By increasing the effort of the remaining fleet, the effort on the Wadden Sea did not change significantly, lower catches were compensated by good shrimp prices with as a result a positive economic result in the year after the decommissioning. In the long term, the fishery is now limited with a number of licences around 20% lower than the prior number of active vessels, with no possibility of increasing again.

Gene editing is an emerging technology with diverse applications in the making, including in livestock. While the technology is commonly represented as offering unbounded possibilities and societal benefit, it remains unclear how to characterise public views and the process through which responses are developed. Rather than simply being about individual attitudes, beliefs or preferences, we explicate an interpretative approach that seeks to understand how people make sense of the technology in the form of shared cultural idioms and stories. Based on five anticipatory focus group discussions with Dutch publics, we found the prevalence of five narratives shaping public talk, namely, technological fix, the market rules, in pursuit of perfection, finding the golden mean and governance through care. We explore the implications of these findings for governance and reflect on the virtues of sophrosyne and phronesis as offering ways to reconfigure the practice and politics of gene editing.

Sustainable fishing is one of the most pressing challenges for mankind and requires insightful knowledge of the drivers that may foster or hinder predatory exploitation. It has been widely recognized that Indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources, such as fisheries, worldwide. Nevertheless such knowledge continues to be marginalized and unacknowledged by a range of academic scientists and policy makers. In the present paper, we tackle this issue by discussing laws regarding closed fishing seasons, which are part of the Brazilian environmental policies for protecting marine fauna, from the perspective of artisanal fishers’ knowledge. In Brazil, these laws are typically based on governmental decisions (i.e., by administrative organizations and researchers acting as consultants) without taking fishers’ knowledge into account. Through semi-structured interviews with traditional experts of fishing villages situated along the northeast coast of Brazil, we aimed to investigate their knowledge of fish reproductive periods and analyze how it is related to the closed seasons at work in their region. We found an exact agreement between fishers’ knowledge and closed season regulations on the reproductive period of the mangrove crab (Ucides cordatus), but a conflict regarding the reproductive period of two snook species and four species of shrimps. We highlight the potential of fishers’ knowledge contributions to environmental regulations and we also explore three challenges of incorporating epistemic diversity in environmental policy. We conclude by advocating for a reflexive transdisciplinarity that highlights the potential of Indigenous and local knowledge while critically reflecting on the methodological and political challenges of transdisciplinary practices.

The triangle of dairy intensification, commercialisation and market formalisation is promoted to address the challenges of food and nutrition security (FNS) and climate change. This article questions the need for formalisation to reach intensification and commercialisation objectives in Kenya. Moving beyond the binary perception of milk markets as either ‘formal’ or ‘informal’, we investigate a repertoire of milk-collection practices and address the following question: ‘What enables diverse intermediary practices to ensure a consistent flow of milk from grass to glass?’ Sampling, data collection and analysis were guided by a qualitative research design for an empirical exploration of the practices of owner-operated (N = 13) and corporate (N = 4) milk collectors. Iterative analysis of observations revealed three main themes constituting milk-collection practices: (1) buying milk, (2) managing milk (quantity and quality measurement) and (3) selling milk to the next buyer. These practices were enabled and sustained by the diverse options available for each aspect of milk collection, and by the capacity of collectors to accommodate variety in their practices. We invite scholars and practitioners to conduct deeper explorations of how to accommodate events in practice to enhance the success of ambitions relating to FNS and climate change through pathways of intensification and commercialisation.

Digital Twins are conceptualized as real-time digital representations of real-life physical entities or systems. They are explored for a wide array of societal implementations, and in particular to help address fundamental societal challenges. As accurate digital equivalents of their real-life twin, Digital Twins substitute their physical twin in knowledge production and decision-making processes. They raise high expectations: they are expected to produce new knowledge, expose issues early, predict future behavior, and help to optimize the physical twin. Data play a key role here because they form the building blocks from which the Digital Twin representation is created. However, data are not neutral phenomena but products of human-technology interaction. In this article, we therefore raise the question of how a Digital Twin data collection is created, and what implications does this have for Digital Twins? To answer this question, we explore the data collection process in three cases of Digital Twin development at a university. Connecting to Jasanoff's theoretical framework of regimes of sight, we approach the creation of a data collection as acts of seeing and recording that influence how reality is represented in data, as well as give a certain legitimacy and authority to the data collection. By examining the acts of seeing and recording and their respective roles in producing the data collection, we provide insight into the struggles of representation in Digital Twins and their implications.

Background Fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, an alien invasive pest from the Americas, was detected in Zambia late 2016 and since has caused significant losses on maize threatening livelihood and food security. Individually, farmers continue to rely on synthetic pesticides, a reactive measure to manage new invasive insect pests, posing risks to human health, the environment and biodiversity. Biological control has been proven to be an efficient, cost effective and safe method for pest and disease management, and when adopted collectively, its effectiveness can increase. In addition, collective action has been acknowledged to be a critical component for invasive species management, but is still poorly studied in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) where the national plant health system, in-place to prevent and manage biological invasions, is limited. Methods To study the feasibility of creating a collective action to promote biological control for fall armyworm among smallholder farmers in rural Zambia and the social and institutional conditions needed for it to be successful and sustainable, we conducted focus group discussions and in-depth interviews in two districts with maize smallholder farmers. Our model to assess the results applies both Ostrom’s 8 Design Principles for a community-based management of common-pool resources and criteria of an agricultural innovation that meet the community’s requirements, and also pays attention to the exchange and brokering processes needed to match the two. Results Our results showed that some conditions are already in place to support a collective action to manage fall armyworm such as matching rules to local conditions, collective-choice arrangement, conflict-resolution mechanism and minimal recognition of rights to organize which are supported by traditional leadership of the communities. However other conditions would need to be strengthened for the collective pest management to be sustainable. The most important criteria for a pest management innovation selected by participants from both districts, in no specific order, were price, efficacy, recommended by agrodealer/extension officer and immediate action. Conclusions This study fills a gap in understanding social and institutional conditions in LMIC needed to sustain a collective action that aim at controlling a highly mobile and invasive pest. Our study emphasizes the need to redefine technologies and dissemination in terms of supporting the processes of co-designing innovation based on social and ecological conditions.

Without a protein transition, global sustainability targets will be impossible to reach. This book examines the transition to sustainable protein systems in the broadest possible context. Perspectives from social scientists are presented alongside perspectives from technologists. Academic contributors from across the globe explain the science behind the transition, while industry interviews highlight in-practice examples. Some viewpoints are shared, some divergent, some polarizing. A picture emerges of a complex transition-in-progress, with many different individual motivations coalescing toward a shared goal. The wide range of proposed solutions need not be considered competitive. The future will include a range of options serving different geographies, needs, and preferences. It is only through pursuit of multiple pathways that the route to transition will be found.