Scale dynamics of grassroots innovations through parallel pathways of transformative change

An important issue for the study of grassroots innovations and the geography of sustainability transitions is how scales affect transformative change. In this paper we will address the questions of 1) how grassroots innovations for sustainable agriculture are scaled and 2) the consequences of crossing different scales and levels on the characteristics of the grassroots innovation. We propose a framework of five different scales to analyze the development of grassroots innovations and we apply this framework on the long-term development of an agricultural grassroots innovation movement that pioneered innovative dairy farming practices combined with landscape management. The results show how the initial innovation coalition built around low external input farming became fragmented. Each of the resulting new grassroots innovation coalitions used different strategies for upscaling and outscaling that depended on differences in their (regional) contexts and institutional support. The grassroots innovation thus developed along three parallel, at times intersecting, innovation pathways. The distributed agency of multiple actor groups working in parallel leads to a continuous renegotiating of meaning that poses a challenge to the idea of planned processes of outscaling and upscaling of grassroots innovations.

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