Assessing Socio-Technical Innovation in Developed Agricultural Economies: Results and Reflections from a TIS-Analysis of Agroecological Farming in the Netherlands

Technological innovation systems (TIS) analyses have been providing insights in the processes and conditions to diffuse and scale up sustainable technologies across a range of sectors over the past two decades (Negro, Suurs, and Hekkert 2008; Wieczorek and Hekkert 2012). These studies give insights on the functioning of innovation systems, and tend to provide salient recommendations for policy-makers. The approach has been adapted to the agricultural sector, resulting both in empirical insights for socio-ecological rather than technical systems and adaptations of the framework (Schiller et al. 2020; Pigford, Hickey, and Klerkx 2018). Empirical insights from these studies have tended to assess systemic problems of agricultural sectors as a whole (c.f. Turner et al. 2016), making more general policy recommendations at a relatively high level of abstraction. Relatively few focus on a particular sub-sector and thus provide more specific and actionable insights (with the exception of e.g. Menary, Collier, and Seers 2019). In a similar vein as the latter, this paper asks to what extent the innovation system for nature-inclusive (agroecological) dairy farming in the Netherlands can facilitate a transition towards a more sustainable dairy sector, following the TIS framework and using a mixed methods approach of semi-structured interviews, workshops and desk research. Results indicate that systemic problems in the case at hand can be traced back to the TIS functions “guidance of the search” and “overcome resistance to change”, highlighting the political nature of the transition towards agroecological farming in the Netherlands. The fact that the Netherlands has been experiencing severe farmer protests over environmental policies and a perceived chasm between farmers and society (Schaart 2019) further underscores this. The presentation will not only present the results of the study, but also reflect on the relevance and fit of the TIS approach to transitions with strong “landscape forces” (Avelino 2017; Geels 2011). In addition, we will reflect on how social and institutional innovations like agroecological farming can be assessed following this approach.