Innovation Ecosystems and Agtech Development: Engaging Finance Capital for Socioecological Transformation?

Thursday, 10 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: ASJE025 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC40 Sociology of Agriculture and Food (host committee)

Language: English

This session focuses on agtech research and development and explores how innovation processes and resulting technologies vary depending on the set up, shape, location, and purpose of the ‘innovation ecosystems’ and the actors involved in them. We are interested in understanding the role of funding structures and how these influence the actors included or excluded, the support and networks being offered, and the kinds of technologies promoted. We seek to identify the implications of different institutional set ups and governmental structures within innovation ecosystems, as well as regional differences between them. While many innovation ecosystems are firmly embedded within mainstream capitalist logics and are closely connected to big agri-business corporates and financial capital, others have been set up with more radical or progressive intentions trying to circumvent, undermine, or use capitalist necessities in creative ways. We want to address these different motivations and intentions behind innovation ecosystems, including the constraints they face, the creative strategies developed, and the contradictions we can find within these strategies of trying to make a difference within a predominantly capitalist environment. On a more conceptual level, this session seeks to bring together different case studies of innovation ecosystems and related analysis to address the relationship between agtech and socioecological transformation more broadly. We are interested in research that engages questions of structural constraints, agency, and intersections between these different frames. Ultimately, we want to tease out the limits of plasticity of contemporary capitalism and explore the possibilities of consciously engaging finance capital for socioecological transformation.
Session Organizers:
Sarah SIPPEL, University of Meunster, Germany, Steven WOLF, Cornell University, USA and Cynthia GHARIOS, Leipzig University, Germany
Oral Presentations
Mapping Financing Ecosystems in Nova Scotia: Implications for Sustainable Food System Transitions
Phoebe STEPHENS, Dalhousie University, Canada
Dual-Use Politics: Cyber Sensors, the Emerging Military-Agri-Tech Complex in Israel/Palestine, and the Battle Against the Red Palm Weevil in Middle Eastern Date Plantations.
Grosglik RAFI, Israel; Natalia GUTKOWSKI, independent researcher, Jerusalem, Israel
Sustainable Agriventures for Empowered Women and Youth (SAVE-WY). an Iwmi-Muast Collaborative Agripreneurship Intervention in Zimbabwe.
Seipati MOKHEMA BIANCA, South Africa; Tanya RUKASHA, Marondera University of Agricultural Science and Technology, Zimbabwe; Lovemore MUSEMWA, Bindura University of Science Education, Zimbabwe
From ‘Green Revolution’ to ‘Data Revolution’: How India’s Emerging Ag-Tech Ecosystem Builds on the Capitalist-Colonial Promise of Technological Emancipation
Kushang MISHRA, Univrsity of Auckland, India; Karly BURCH, University of Otago, New Zealand
Environmentalizing Venture Capital: The Politics of Using “Life Cycle Assessments” for the Valuation of Startup “Impact”
Cornelius HEIMSTÄDT, Germany
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