Christos Marinos-kouris (p), Eleni Toli, Panagiota Koltsida

Marcello De Rosa

The deployment of new innovative technologies, systems and routines that facilitate the integration of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the enhancement of sustainable growth in rural-agricultural areas play a crucial role for inclusive digital agricultural transition. Precision agricultural systems, remote sensing, big data, GIS and IoT technologies are providing a valuable toolbox for tackling challenges and reaching desired goals that are linked with the food-water-energy nexus as well as biodiversity protection and citizen’s wellbeing. However, the digitalization process can create pitfalls of ‘self-reflection’ focusing on the sole adoption and utilization of digital advancements and loosening the ties that stipulate it as a mean towards the goal of sustainable development transition. A sustainable digital technology diffusion demand from rural, agricultural communities and farmers to assume a new role that will differentiate them from being perceived as mainly direct payers of service beneficiaries and will transform them into information and data collectors-processors and generators that help in conducting a sustainable digital transformation process. This paper presents work from one of 20 LLs run by the H2020 project DESIRA. Located in Northern Greece, the multi-disciplinary LL is built around a group of farmers that plan to gradually transition from traditional tobacco crops to other types of cultivation while utilizing for the first time new agricultural digital tools and services. The LL aims in monitoring the farmers engagement with new digital agricultural methods and providing them support in integrating the new digital tools and infrastructures to their agricultural business routines to strengthen their position in the local agri-food value chain. Local market players and extension service providers factor in data processing and decision support routines and contribute to the alleviation of the last-mile barrier of applying new agricultural technologies while also help in fully understanding the needs, capacities, and concerns of farmers practices. However, the lack of in-parallel development of farmer’s digital skills that could enable meeting the technical demands of digital agriculture, as well as the low level of market-oriented interventions and lacking governance support to institutionalize sustainable agriculture in policy making, hinder the reformation of agriculture and sustainable rural transition.

Gianluca Brunori (p)

Gianluca Brunori

The Green Deal has identified two transitions for Europe: digital and ecological transitions. However, the links between the two transitions are not clear yet, and there is the risk that the policies supporting the two transitions don't speak to each other. This risk is particularly evident with rural areas, where it is even difficult to get accurate data on the level of digitalization and of its impacts. Drawing on results of the DESIRA project, the paper will discuss a research and policy agenda for sustainable digitalization in rural areas. In particular, the paper wants to answer to the following questions:
* How agriculture and rural areas are living digitalization processes? How nuanced is the landscape of digitalization?
* What are the likely scenarios of digitalization in the next decade?
* What subjects, infrastructures, technologies, organizational methods are needed to link digital and ecological transition?
* What are the most suitable governance patterns to exploit the potential of digital technologies in the ecological transition?
* How to make digitalization inclusive to the diversity of farm models that contribute to various ecological pathways?
The paper will contribute to answer to these questions by discussing two concepts that aim at explaining the diversified patterns of uptake of digital technologies across contexts. The first one is digital readiness, that highlights the need to design digitalization strategies tailored to the characteristics of the users and of their context. I will argue that the concept of Technological Readiness is too narrow to assess the potential uptake of a technology in rural areas and will propose to articulate the measure of readiness into "users' readiness", related to individual skills and motivations, and "scaling readiness", that links technological characteristics to the broader context to which technologies apply.
The second concept is 'digital ecosystem', which encompasses the ecological, infrastructural, and human capital conditions that allow a proper uptake of digital technologies, and that might limit the beneficial impact of digitalization. The analysis of digital ecosystems will allow a system approach to the analysis of costs and benefits of digitalization, as it will allow to measure the impact of the introduction of new technologies through the systemic connections of farm processes. The concept will also allow the introduction of a "digital ecosystem conduciveness" indicator, which measures to what extent the digital ecosystem to which the farm belongs can facilitate the successful adoption of digital technologies.

Livia Ortolani (p), Fabio Lepore, Alessio Ferrari, Manlio Bacco, Gianluca Brunori

Gianluca Brunori

Digitalization is considered as an opportunity to enhance sustainability in agriculture and rural areas by several international institutions and policies. However, this approach risk underestimating the possible undesirable effects due to the social complexity of digital technologies and the need to take into consideration contextual specificities. Digitalization is increasing the flows of information from the field to the decision-making levels and vice-versa with different purposes (e.g., policy monitoring, environmental performance evaluation, improved management, e-governance, etc.). Policies and institutional structures represent important factors to address the diffusion of such technologies, especially if such diffusion should contribute to broader sustainability goals. Different public investments are needed to address the digitalization process in each context.
The present research wants to explore the connections between digital solutions and impacts in a specific application scenario, considering contextual specificity.
The research has been carried on in the framework of one of the H2020 DESIRA project Living Labs. Engaging relevant stakeholders in a participatory process anticipating future impact pathways trajectories is the method applied in DESIRA Living Labs in order to contribute to the reflection on digital transformation in agriculture and rural areas. The Living Lab Toscana Nord has been organized around the activity of land and water management carried on by the local public authority Consorzio Toscana Nord with the aim of looking at how digital technologies can improve ordinary land management in order to reduce the hydrogeological risk.
Qualitative in-deep interviews with experts and stakeholders have been carried on in order to define the SCPS and the functional use of each technology mentioned by local actors. For each functional use identified in the application scenario, considering contextual specificities, impacts have been identified on the basis of the interviews and the taxonomy proposed by Rolandi et al. (16). Identified impacts have been then clustered and connected to the SDGs.

Teresa Del Giudice, Marcello De Rosa (p), Martina Francescone

Livia Ortolani

Recent challenges in the agrifood system call for transformative adaptation, boosted by innovation that can take on disruptive characters (Klerkx, 2020). Surely, digitalization is one of the most important solutions encouraged by the policy makers, which is gaining ground in the last decades, thanks to a set of available innovation allowing an easier transition towards more sustainable and resilient farming systems.
As a matter of fact, how digitalization may improve this transition represents a relevant field of analysis, due to the high complexity behind the question of “innovation adoption” among potential stakeholders. As a consequence, more comprehensive and ecosystemic approaches are necessary with the purpose of taking into account social, economic and geographical dimensions affecting the entrepreneurial decision of adopting digital solutions.
Therefore, starting from an ecosystemic perspective, this paper analyses the mechanisms of building up digital business ecosystems we will label as Digital Rural and Agricultural Business Ecosystems (DRABE). More precisely, the purpose of the proposal is to explore the role of digital solutions in boosting transition towards sustainable farming systems.
Starting from the literature on business and innovation ecosystems, the last being ecosystems aiming to value creation, we concentrate our attention on the relevance of the following research questions:
1.How a DRABE is built?
2.How social, economic and geographical characteristics of rural areas could affect DRABE creation?
3.How DRABE affect transition towards sustainable farming systems?
4.What is the role of policies in boosting transition and fostering DRABE?
In order to answer these questions, we problematize proximity relations through:
a) excavating relationships among actors in rural systems where digital solutions are going to be adopted;
b) analyzing how local actors in rural contexts are able to build up organized proximities, overlapped to geographical proximity.
To this end, the paper is drawn on the school of proximity and emphasizes the importance of investigating both belonging and similarities logics in the adoption of digital solutions.