Agro-Food Innovation and Sustainability Transition: A Conceptual Synthesis

Abstract

The global community faces the challenge of feeding a growing population with declining resources, making transformation to sustainable agriculture and food systems all the more imperative and ‘innovation’ all the more crucial. In this study, agro-food system innovation (re)defines sustainability transition with a complexity construct of cross-scale interaction and an adaptive cycle of system change. By taking a panarchical view, top-down and bottom-up pathways to innovation can be reconciled and are not contradictory, enabling and constraining innovation at every level. This study breaks down the structure of the agricultural innovation system into four components based on multi-level perspectives of sustainability transition, namely: actors and communities, interaction and intermediaries, coherence and connectedness and regimes rules and landscape. Meanwhile, this research frames the functional construct of system innovation for food and agriculture with five perspectives drawing on broad inputs from different schools of thought, namely: knowledge management, user sophistication, entrepreneurial activities’ directionality and reflexive evaluation. This research advocates for an ecosystem approach to agricultural innovation that gives full play to niche-regime interactions using social-technical perspectives.