Book of Abstract (incl. addendum) - IFSA symposium 2012

Workshop 2.3 Systems thinking and practice in rural innovation: advances in concept,
methodologies and interventions
resource management innovation. However, there are increasing conceptual and practical challenges in
creating and governing such systems for innovation. The challenge of organising for innovation has
come into recent focus in Australian primary industries through federal government initiatives focusing
on greater efficiency and effectiveness from research to support sector productivity (PISC, 2010).
With multiple research organisations and interests and geographically distributed practitioners and
communities, questions about how to organise and manage for enhanced innovation have come to the
foreground.
This paper reviews and analyses four different models or approaches to innovation
conceptualised as operating in the Australian dairyfarming sector between June 2009 and 2010. The
unit of analysis was the innovation program area or domain (e.g. milk quality, animal performance or
people development) rather than specific projects or specific practices or technologies. The strengths,
weaknesses and risks associated with the different models are explored. One particular model, (named
by the authors “Development-led innovation”) emphasises the need for and role of program
development as a social platform whereby public and commercial interests and networks are engaged
in ongoing, joint action. This model mirrors key features of open innovation and may be best
considered as a support structure for innovation. Challenges in implementation concern the
governance arrangements; the re-configuration of “research-led” innovation cultures; and the measures
of “development” success.
Multi-stakeholder creation of social-ecological win-win solutions – mangling
sustainable nitrate reductions in a Danish sub-catchment setting
Anne Mette S. Langvad
Aarhus University, Denmark
Annemette.Langvad@agrsci.dk
The purpose of this paper is to explore why multi-stakeholder creation of win-win solutions and
sustainable transition processes turn out to be so difficult in social-ecological management practice.
The paper is based on a qualitative longitudinal case study of decision makings within a group of
primary stakeholders of water environmental management organized around a sub catchment to a
Danish fiord. By way of participant observation I follow the collective search for and construction of
measurements to nitrate reduction that are potentially sustainable in the sense that they prove beneficial
to all of the involved stakeholders.
I take a process analytical, performative and STS inspired approach (e.g. Pickering 1995) to
unveiling the micro-political processes involved in multi-stakeholder managing.
Through an analysis of the emergence, decision making and closing down of decision events, I
identify material and social aspects of agency, their ‘interactive stabilizations’ and how they come to
determine the continued structuring of win-win potentialities.
In line with the performative approach, no pre-analytical assumptions of specific stake-holder
interests and perspectives are made. Rather perspective formation is empirically investigated and
special focus put upon how stakeholders’ mobilize material and social elements in searching for certain
courses of nitrate reducing action.
Stakeholders draw on elements of an existing water management regime. But instead of seeing
the regime as something external and structuring to practice, I argue that an approach directly
interested in sustainable transition has to view regime elements as instrinsically interwoven with and
internal to practice.
By explaining in this manner why the construction of win-win solutions is so difficult in practice
a more profound understanding of transition management is reached for.
43