Mission-oriented agrifood innovation systems in the making: a transdisciplinary approach to identify context-specific...

A new generation of transformative policies has recently led to conceptual advances that map and evaluate agrifood innovation dynamics that contribute to the fulfillment of a societal mission within clearly defined time frames. In the context of the "European Green Deal", national policies are being implemented with varying levels of government ambition and rigor, which is not yet reflected in these concepts. This article provides a framework and a methodology to help multi- and transdisciplinary teams to operationalize the transformation of an agrifood innovation system (AIS) into a mission-oriented agrifood innovation system (MAIS) in the absence of clear policy goals and objectives, i.e., where policymakers do not provide for the development of a mission. Within the safe space of a transdisciplinary research project, researchers and practitioners aim to understand where to start a sustainability transformation by examining subsectoral, transformative and directable drivers of change (DoC) in Austrian beef and dairy. To gather and integrate knowledge from different scientific and societal perspectives on how to transform this specific subsector, they established and facilitated a policy-independent, transdisciplinary mission arena. Besides context-specific results related to Austrian beef and dairy supply, we discuss the contribution of our transdisciplinary research to identify transformative and directable DoC as leverage points for transforming an AIS into a MAIS. Moreover, we explore the potentials, challenges and limitations of a policy-independent, transdisciplinary mission arena to provide orientation in the absence of national sustainability goals and objectives. Our conclusion includes a brief outlook for further research.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-025-01719-2.