Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation systems (AKIS) refer to the systems, structures, actors, initiatives and connections which generate and move knowledge and innovation in agri-food systems. The complexity and importance of AKIS underly the reasoning for the increasing focus on understanding and improving these systems at every level. However, this varies across different AKIS, and for organic agriculture, aquaculture and value chain actors, the understanding and development of knowledge and innovation systems within these themes, has been limited.
It is for this reason that the OrganicTargets4EU project innovated a multistakeholder approach to examine KIS for organic agriculture, aquaculture, and processing and retail. The approach allows for context-specificity, in-depth expert and experiential insights, and collaboration between actors in the KIS. The methodology can produce insights to identify and analyse knowledge brokers, their relationships and the overall information exchange infrastructure. This can help to reveal the capacities needed for knowledge transfer as a basis for the further development of organic agriculture and aquaculture in Europe.
The methodology includes the following elements:
- Defining AKIS, their characteristics, lock-ins, enabling factors, key actors and supports
- Assessment of policies and funds, connections between actors and farmer supports
- Expert interviews (with e.g., knowledge providers, organic farmers’ organisations, stakeholders of the organic aquaculture sector, certification bodies and policymakers)
- Online surveys (with e.g., advisory services, expert/certification bodies, representatives of different organic farmers’ associations)
- KIS stakeholder mapping based on previous steps
- Country-focused reports on KIS
- Concluding key barriers, lock-ins and bottlenecks and recommendations based on the previous steps
The conceptualisation of AKIS for organic is not meant to be understood as a separate system, but one which is ideally in cooperation with the conventional system. In this sense, these steps provide a useful methodology for analysing organic agricultural, aquacultural, and value chain KIS in the Irish context, thus complementing other EU funded projects (e.g., ProAKIS and i2Connect), which focus on the prevailing conventional agricultural systems.
To find out more about this innovation you can visit the project website at https://organictargets.eu/ .
