Harnessing digital transformation to build social-ecological-systems resilience into institutional arrangements of agricultural transformation

Abstract

This study had the transformative purpose of exploring how to harness digital transformation to integrate small-scale farmers into commercial value chains and markets to effect agricultural transformation like how platform business models integrate small-scale players into commercial value chains and markets whilst fundamentally restructuring industries. Agricultural transformation is constrained by current institutional arrangements for agriculture as a complex social-ecological-system (SES). The critical social sciences study qualitatively explored how to build SES resilience into institutional arrangements for Gauteng’s high value horticulture to stimulate the emergence of new trajectories to create new SES regimes that result in agricultural transformation. The study’s multi-case participatory action research design with small-scale farmers utilised digital transformation as a conceptual framework. The study finds and submits that agricultural transformation, an aspirational concept steeped in historical analyses, ignores current realities most important of which is that the smallness of small-scale farmers is a major inhibitor to agricultural transformation. This thesis proposes reconceptualising agricultural transformation as digitally enabled agricultural transformation to address agricultural transformation’s scale and currency challenges. The study utilised platform business models to develop an architecture for a hybrid agricultural industry multi- sided marketplace super-app platform that can be built through the study’s proposed digital agriculture disruption framework.