Advancing the agricultural and food systems towards sustainable transformation at a systemic level necessitates a deep understanding and proliferation of innovation and scientific knowledge across a multitude of actors, disciplines and institutions, including the synergy between a range of public and private actors. These interactions between actors present both opportunities and challenges that may lead to desirable or undesirable outcomes because of the structural, functional, relational, and cognitive components of socio-technical-ecological systems. However, our current research and innovation processes do not have the full capacity to act as catalysts for the system’s knowledge to be synergized for the urgently required change. This panel proposes to capture the complexity of the proliferation and dissemination of scientific knowledge by assessing the agricultural and food systems from a multi-dimensional and multi-actor perspective. We seek to understand how scientific knowledge can drive intentional changes targeted at the interdependencies of institutions, technologies, and a multitude of actors to navigate complex systems towards sustainability transformation.
The session aims to critically explore a number of questions, including (but not limited to):
- how scientific knowledge is transmitted and diffused, co-created, and implemented across actors and institutions in agri-food systems
- how synergies can be combined to support the transition to sustainable food systems
- how to foster human agency, values, and necessary capacities to facilitate scientific knowledge transfer, sharing, co-creation and application at the interface of science, policy and practice
Abstract is due by 23:59 on February 22, 2023 (Finnish time).