2025/12/01 by Aurélie Cardona, Catherine Mignolet, Valérie Angeon +10 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Agricultural Innovations and Practices #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Sustainability and Climate Change Governance
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s13593-025-01069-4
openalex publication_date 2025/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract The development of agroecology requires an ambitious, multi-level transformation of knowledge and innovation systems. The literature shows that intermediary actors and organizations play an important role in this transformation. In our article, we introduce the idea that agricultural research experiment stations can be considered as innovation intermediaries to foster agroecological transitions. Previous studies have shown how agricultural experiments are transformed by their inclusion in a multi-actor process, but they do not adequately explain how they contribute to the transition of agri-food systems. Our analysis focuses on nine case studies of on-station system experiments by France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment. These on-station system experiments have the specificity to be managed by researchers interacting with non-academic stakeholders from their local areas. We have called these Open on-Station System Experiments. We documented them over five years, during which we collected information and data through observation, participation, eliciting activity, and cross-case analysis. We show how OSEs fulfil five knowledge and innovation intermediation functions that contribute, in practice, to the transition of agri-food systems: problem solving; production of transition visions through the design and experimentation of breakthrough agroecological innovations; production of operational and scientific knowledge responding to different users’ requirements; by generating operational and scientific knowledge based on Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable data; participation in networking between stakeholders and interactional learning about transition using experiments as boundary objects. Based on these findings, we show for the first time the conditions under which agricultural research experiment stations can fulfill the functions of innovation intermediaries and thus contribute to fostering agroecological transitions.