Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The increasing use of digital technologies in agriculture is bringing about a digital transformation in agriculture. More and more data are collected, analysed, and used in agriculture and technologies used in agriculture are increasingly digitally connected. These changes do not come without impacts to agriculture, and there are concerns that the digital transformation has uneven impacts on agriculture and broader society. Over the past years, various authors have called for the inclusion of diverse actors in shaping the digital transformation to ensure a fair and just transformation. However, there remain knowledge gaps about both the impacts of the digital transformation and the response of diverse actors to this transformation. This dissertation responds to these knowledge gaps by providing an understanding of how power, agency, and knowledge of actors in the agricultural system are changing. It does this through analysing the digital transformation of agriculture across Europe with a focus on The Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium). The main research question of this work that follows from this is: “what is the current role and potential of diverse forms of agency and knowledge in the digital transformation of European agriculture, and what impact do participatory approaches have on including these diverse forms of agency and knowledges?”. Out of this main research question we develop five research questions that address the developments of power, knowledge, and agency in the digital transformation of agriculture. These research questions are answered in their respective empirical chapters (chapters 4-8). The data that forms the basis for the 5 empirical chapters was collected between 2018 and 2023. Qualitative data formed the basis for this research and was collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups. The five empirical research chapters provide the following answers to the main research question: Chapter 4 describes knowledge conflict and claims of knowledge legitimacy in technology development and deployment. This chapter shows how different forms of knowledge are mobilised to build technological legitimacy and the potential for more conflictual participation through agonistic pluralism in knowledge conflicts. Chapter 5 connects this to a case study on a participatory theory building process. This work shows how the fear of alienating stakeholders stops researchers from introducing theory into participatory activities. This also shows how participation is sometimes limited to deal with tensions in participatory research. Chapter 6 explicitly notes the agency of farmers in making digital agriculture work and the actions they take to shape digital agriculture on their farms. This is connected to the knowledge of farmers in digital agriculture in chapter 7, where we show how embodied knowledge plays a key role in how farmers make sense of precision agriculture. Chapter 8 extends the notion of agency to other actors in the agricultural system, describing how remote sensing technologies are negatively impacting the agency of bureaucrats in agri-environmental governance. Additionally, this chapter sets out potential approaches for digital technologies in agri-environmental governance that do enable agency. Together, these chapters provide a more nuanced understanding of distributed agency than previously reported in studies on the digital transformation of agriculture, as well as the diffuse functioning of power. At the same time, this does not deny the uneven impacts of the digital transformation in agriculture, and we highlight the need for various approaches that can reduce power and knowledge hierarchies in agriculture. This includes both the resistance to repressive power, alternative technological platforms as well as regulation of existing structures.
Author: van der Velden, Daniel
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7056843307