Zhuwao, Patrick2025-02-262024Zhuwao, Patrick. (2024). Harnessing digital transformation to build social-ecological-systems resilience into institutional arrangements of agricultural transformation [Master’s dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg].WireDSpace.https://hdl.handle.net/10539/43970A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Commerce, Law, and Management, Wits Business School, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024This 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.en© 2025 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.agricultural innovation systemsagricultural transformationdigital transformationexponential organisationinstitutional arrangementsplatform business modelssocial-ecological-systems resilience.SDG-9: Industry, innovation and infrastructureDissertationUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg