Pathways towards sustainability
Over the past decade the transition towards sustainable agriculture has been a central theme in the work of many organisations, including government bodies, NGOs, professional organisations and research institutions. Various publications, including White Papers by the EU and different national governments, define future targets and objectives to improve sustainability in various subsectors like animal production, arable farming, or glasshouse horticulture. There are also growing concerns about the sustainable use of biomass for fuel, feed and fibres, which also became public issues in terms of ethical or economic relations regarding the multi-functionality of agriculture.
It has become clear that the development of our industrial societies has had serious negative effects. This is true for a variety of sectors including the agro-food system (sensu largo, that is including the production of food, feed, fuel and fibres). Despite the adoption of the notion of sustainable development by most governments as a basic policy principle, it is becoming increasingly clear that the achievement of a ‘post-industrial’ society will not necessarily result in a more sustainable society, i.e. a society that is characterised by a better balance between economic, social and ecological goals. Ensuring that any transition that might be taking place does lead to more sustainability is a major challenge for societies in general and for agro-food systems in particular. In this context the relations between agronomic sciences, agricultural technologies and public or private expectations are at stake. This leads to claims for “innovative innovation” concerning the purposes and ways of designing new technologies and practices or new practices in relation to existing techniques. In fact, these claims indicate a need for a shift in the governance of research and innovation to achieve a sustainable future.
Nevertheless, the transition to sustainable agro-food systems will not be an easy or straightforward one. One of the reasons for this is the extremely complicated nature of the required long term societal changes. Such a transition will require the adoption and diffusion of new technologies embedded in new economic, social, institutional and cultural relations.
Dynamics of Innovation as a scientific issue
Innovation has been defined as crucial for such a transition, which typically refers to technological change. Indeed, a variety of new technologies will be needed to meet the sustainability challenges in the various agricultural subsectors. Technological change, however, will not be enough. The enormous challenges ahead will also require new regu¬lations, new behaviour (e.g. of consumers, farmers as well as many other stakeholders), cultural change, institutional change, and institutional ‘hybridicity’ (Allaire and Wolf, 2004). While some authors use the term ‘system innovation’ to denote such broad change processes (e.g. Elzen et al. 2004; Geels 2005), others develop the notion of innovative design (Lemasson, et al., 2006) in socio-economic orders or agro-food systems (Aggeri et Hatchuel, 2003). A specific example of the latter are participatory design and mediation activities in situation of change in R&D system of activities (Beguin & Cerf, 2009).
System innovations are multi-factor, multi-actor and multi-level (multi-scaled) and can only be understood in terms of historical co-evolutionary processes which link up these actors, factors and levels. These historical processes are shot through with uncertainty and are open-ended learning processes. Influencing such processes has proved to be difficult, but not impossible. To stimulate sustainable development, the challenge is to influence developments at an early stage, when irreversibilities have not yet set in and one can hope to sway the balance between desirable and undesirable developments.
Researches on system innovation, knowledge regimes and design practices in the agro-food sector can be considered as pivotal examples of what Gibbons et al. (1994) called a mode 2 type of knowledge production. In fact, it transcends traditional disciplinary science in two ways, viz. (1) it combines insights from various disciplines and (2) knowledge is generated in a combined effort between scientists and stakeholders from the domain under investigation. But, after the debates about the Mode 1 – Mode 2 model (Pestre, 2003), researchers and practitioners are aware that more knowledge about those dynamics is needed and more expertise is required to get further. This is why a joint effort between European researchers, policy makers and strategic actors of the agro-food sector is of crucial importance to reflect, compare and design elements of the roadmap towards sustainable agriculture.
Rationale of the international workshop
The key starting point for the meeting is that technical change and societal change are highly related, forming a seamless web (Hughes 1986). The position taken is that any transition to sustainability will imply a high level of social-cultural change coupled with a similar high level of technological change and, correlatively, many global or local social debates about the ways of designing the future and the realization of system innovation. In a general sense, system innovations are defined as major changes in the way societal functions such as food production and consumption, energy use and supply, transpor¬tation, etc., are fulfilled. Such changes typically involve a co-evolution of a number of related elements, including technology, infrastructures, symbolic meanings, governance structures, scientific knowledge, industry and related institutions etc.
The need for system innovations that lead to more sustainable development paths has been recognised in various policy networks and research programmes. This is not only relevant for the agro-food system but for a variety of other systems as well, e.g. the energy and transportation systems. Over the past decade, this has rendered a host of insights in innovation processes as well as practical experiences on attempts to stimulate system innovation towards sustainability.
It appears, however, that there is a considerable mismatch between general insights developed in research and the more detailed practical issues that are at stake in concrete projects and programmes. As a result, it is far from clear how to set up projects and programmes to contribute to system innovation towards sustainability. One reason, sourced by historical studies, is that system innovations can take a long time (of the order of decades) and rarely result from a single new development but from a long process of combination and re-combination of novelties from different sources. This calls for a comprehensive and reflexive understanding of shifts in knowledge regimes and design practices. This workshop seeks to lay the foundations for such an endeavour, in terms of analysis as well as in terms of governance.
References
- Aggeri, F., et Hatchuel, A., (2003). “Ordres socio-économiques et polarisation de la recherche dans l’agriculture: pour une critique des rapports science/société”, Sociologie du Travail, 45(4): 113-133.
- Allaire G., Wolf S., (2004). “Cognitive Representations and Institutional Hybridity in Agrofood Systems of Innovation”. Science, Technology and Human Values, 29 (4): 431-458.
- Béguin P., and Cerf M., 2009. Dynamique des savoirs, dynamique des changements, Editions Octares, Collection Travail et Activité humaine.
- Elzen, B., Geels, F.W. and Green, K. (Eds.), 2004. System Innovation and the Transition to Sustainability. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd. Cheltenham.
- Geels, F.W., 2005. Technological Transitions and System Innovations: A co-evolutionary and socio-technical analysis. Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., Cheltenham.
- Gibbons, Michael; Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott, & Martin Trow (1994). The new production of knowledge: the dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage.
- Hughes, T.P. (1986) 'The Seamless Web: Technology, Science, Etcetera, Etcetera', Social Studies of Science, Vol.16, pp.281-292.
- Lemasson P., Weil B., Hatchuel A., 2006. Les processus d'innovation- Conception innovante et croissance des entreprises, Paris: Hermès
- Pestre D., (2003). “Regimes of knowledge production in society: towards amore political and social reading”, Minerva, 41:245-261.