Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems in European Union policy discourse: Quo vadis?

In its influential publication Save and Grow, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) proposed a new paradigm of intensive farm production, one that is both highly productive and environmentally sustainable (FAO, 2011). It stems from the recognition that, over the past half-century, agriculture based on the intensive use of inputs has increased global food production and average per capita food consumption. In the process, however, it has depleted the natural resources of many agro-ecosystems, jeopardising future productivity, and added to the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change. At the global level, it has not significantly reduced the number of chronically hungry, which FAO (2011) estimated to be 870 million people. The subtitle of Save and Grow is A policymaker’s guide to the sustainable intensification of smallholder crop production, and this reflects an emphasis on helping family farms to achieve higher productivity, profitability and resource use efficiency, while enhancing natural capital. ‘Sustainable intensification’ of agricultural production, or ‘producing more with less’, has been widely adopted as a policy approach by national governments and international agencies, with ‘sustainable’ including the economic (e.g. profitability of farming), environmental (e.g. minimising unfavourable environmental impacts) and social (e.g. maintaining farming communities) dimensions. In particular, sustainable intensification is consistent with the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which has for many years been built on the idea of a ‘European Model of Agriculture’, based on family farming and consisting of a competitive and diverse agricultural sector that is environmentally responsible and addresses issues of food quality and animal welfare (Lowe et al., 2002; Swain, 2013). Sustainable intensification will be facilitated through onfarm innovation, by combining traditional knowledge with modern technologies. The term ‘innovation’ can be used to refer to either a process or an outcome. Through the process of innovation, individuals or organisations master and implement the design and production of goods and services that are new to them, irrespective of whether they are new to their competitors, their country, or the world (World Bank, 2006). The resulting innovation can be a technologically new or remarkably improved product, service, process, a new marketing or management method in the business practice, organisation or external relationship (OECD, 2005). OECD/Eurostat (2018) uses the term ‘innovation activities’ to refer to the process, while the term ‘innovation’ is limited to outcomes. Change can involve farm products, production processes and/or farm organisation and management. In addition to facilitating sustainable intensification, innovation helps farmers to expand, change or diversify their marketable output, thereby increasing the profitability of their farms, to free up resources for use in other economic activities, or enhance the provision of important ecosystem services (FAO, 2014). But innovators rarely work in isolation and the process of innovation is fostered by knowledge sharing between actors with complementary forms of knowledge (Fieldsend et al., 2020). These actors, their organisations, the knowledge flows between them and the so-called ‘enabling environment’ constitute an ‘agricultural innovation system’ (AIS). The changes in the physical, social and economic environment for agriculture are being accompanied by increasAndrew F. FIELDSEND*