REWIRE: Rewiring Collaboration for Sustainable Agriculture Missions
The REWIRE project supports the transition toward circular agriculture by fostering new forms of collaboration across governance levels, regions, and innovation ecosystems.
Centre of Expertise Mission Zero
Despite the Netherlands’ global leadership in agricultural innovation, scaling sustainable alternatives remains challenging due to deeply rooted collaboration patterns and governance barriers. REWIRE responds to this by introducing the concept of multilevel mission-driven ecosystems. These ecosystems cut across micro (organisational), meso (regional), and macro (national and EU policy) levels. The aim is to explore how actors can better align their goals and activities in order to accelerate the circular agriculture transition.
Target group
The REWIRE project aims to tackle collaboration challenges in multilevel ecosystems to synchronize the goals of organisations, ecosystems and (inter-)national policy. We analyse the entire national agricultural system in terms of innovation networks and governance arrangements and further focus on the Circular Metropolis mission in the Western region and the Circular Agrifood mission in the East as contrasting cases.
Duration
01-11-2023 – 31-10-2027
Approach
As a transdisciplinary initiative, REWIRE is where researchers and societal stakeholders come together to co-create practical tools for fostering new collaborations. These tools include a collaboration recommender system, a governance feasibility assessment, and strategies tailored to support both emerging and mature ecosystems. By adhering to a multilevel approach, we aim to facilitate cross-level collaborations and enable systematic learning from practical experiences. This is achieve by data driven techniques to map current collaborations and explore new connections, desk research showing the current policy landscape and finding solutions space through interviews with stakeholders, and in-depth case studies into ecosystems of the Circular Metropolis mission in the Western region and the Circular Agrifood mission in the Eastern region of The Netherlands.
Results
REWIRE aims to accelerate the Dutch sustainable agriculture circularity missions by fostering new collaborations among stakeholders around innovative activities leading to high-value, competitive products and services by moving from animal to plant-based proteins and from unsustainable cities to circular urban living environments. More concretely, REWIRE develops tools and methods focused on breaking away from entrenched collaborations dominated by incumbents to ‘bottom-up’, multi-sector initiatives driving the agriculture transition.
REWIRE – Leveraging new collaborations for circular agriculture missions - Utrecht University
Team
Liliya Terzieva, research group Designing Value Networks
Celina Whitehead, research group Designing Value Networks
Collaboration
Utrecht University, Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University & Research, and HAS Green Academy. Provinces of Noord-Brabant, Zuid-Holland, Overijssel, and Gelderland, The Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Safety, and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. Greenport West-Holland and Foodvalley
Funding
NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)
Contact
Armand van Oostrom
a.g.l.vanoostrom@hhs.nl
+31614328344