All for One and One for All: Dissecting PREMIERE’s Inclusive AKIS Stakeholder Engagement Strategy

Abstract

Innovation is increasingly being considered a social process, more bottom-up and interactive, than top-down science to implementation. Projects funded at a European level under Cluster 6 of the Horizon Europe Work Programme, and EIP-AGRI Operational Groups at a national and regional level in each of the 27 EU Member States, reflect this by placing a greater focus on making the best use of different types of knowledge and complimentary expertise (practical, scientific, technical, organisational, etc.) through the Multi-actor Approach (MAA). A wealth of strategic management literature exists on good practice stakeholder engagement strategies which mobilise the necessary bidirectional and cross-sectoral knowledge exchange and idea generation required for successful co-innovation ecosystems. Its counterpart however, from an Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) perspective, is largely absent. This method article addresses this disparity and gap in literature by describing a 5-step AKIS Stakeholder Engagement Strategy developed by the PREMIERE Horizon Europe Project to help co-create an ‘enabling environment’ to foster and ‘speed up’ innovation, knowledge sharing and digitisation in agriculture, forestry and related sectors through mutually beneficial interactions between an extensive and diverse network of AKIS actors (e.g. researchers, advisors, agri-businesses, farmers) at EU, National and regional level. The inclusive nature of the multi-staged stakeholder engagement strategy outlined in this paper, inspired by strategic management literature, helps close the innovation gap between policy, research and practice through genuine multi-actor dialogue, holistic insights and feedback from project inception to completion, thereby helping to build trusting, meaningful and lasting relationships of mutual respect amongst relevant AKIS stakeholders, ranging from policy makers to harder to reach groups ‘on-the ground’, in place of mere, one-off consultations. The resultant knowledge exchange will significantly contribute to meeting objectives and targets set out in the European Green Deal, EU Climate Policy, Common Agricultural Policy and Farm to Fork Strategy.