Unpacking the agricultural innovation and diffusion for modernizing the smallholders in rural China: From the perspective of agricultural innovation system and its governance

Innovation is perceived as a crucial tool for addressing the serious global challenges faced by the agriculture sector. This paper focuses on a new local public agricultural innovation project in the context of rural China, and intends to capture the embodied agricultural innovation and dissemination network for modernizing the smallholders. Through integrating the concepts of Agricultural Innovation System and Agricultural Innovation Governance, we develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the partnerships between agri-technicians and small farmers within the network structured by innovation governance practices. In-depth interview and network analysis methods were used to scrutinize the linkages among actors engaged with the agricultural innovation programme in case area and detect the achievements in enabling smallholders to upgrade technical trajectories in production and fostering modern farmers at the local levels. Our empirical analysis suggests that the single-center and multi-level network produced in the agricultural innovation practices, which is distinctive to the previous simplistic linear model for technology transfer, demonstrates obvious effectiveness in diffusing the new knowledge both vertically and horizontally, and that the grassroots sub-network generates the interaction space between agronomic experts and farmers for building mutual trust and co-producing technologies suitable for local conditions. Through allocating financial resources and supervising the public agricultural innovation projects, the provincial government indirectly dominates the directionality of local agricultural innovation for enabling smallholders to learn emerging technologies and cultivating the new generation of professional farmers. Nevertheless, the current agricultural innovation practice in case area has not completely avoided the social selection bias due to the clear marginalization of some vulnerable smallholders, and the duration of innovation projects imposed negative influence on the persistent collaborations between agri-technicians and smallholders in places. It is argued that for meeting the national agenda of agricultural modernization and common prosperity in rural area, how to reform the management measures of public innovation projects and enable the vulnerable farmers to equally engage with the innovation activities and share the interests brought by new technologies are the urgent challenges need to be addressed in the future.