Power relations in socio-technical transitions: A multi-level perspective on precision livestock farming technology

This paper takes a multi-level perspective on ongoing socio-technical transitions in precision livestock farming in order to identify the influence of power relations on actors’ identities. While the multi-level perspective is an established lens for explaining long-term technology development that has been applied in the agri-food context for over a decade, there are also well-known critiques pointing to a niche-focused bottom-up approach with a lack of emphasis on incumbent regimes and an absence of agency at the landscape level altogether (Geels 2011; Smith and Stirling 2010). We build on recent work addressing these issues (Contesse et al. 2021; Derwort et al. 2021) as well as on a spatial contextualization of the multi-level perspective (Coenen et al. 2012) and argue that both matters, the (co-) creation of environments and their location within a multi-level system. To illustrate our argument, we study the case of a novel technology for pasture grazing systems. Virtual fencing represents one among several technologies developed in precision livestock farming (Bos et al. 2018) using GPS-based collars to track grazing animals on pastures and keep them within virtual borders signaled when approached. Despite their considerable history of evolution (Umstatter 2011), virtual fencing is far from mainstreamed and still in an early stage of adoption in only a few cases (Norway, New Zealand). How does this socio-technical transition change power relations and the actors’ associated scopes for action? How do institutionalized power relations manifest in supporting or hampering conditions for the development of virtual fencing? Based on data from expert interviews, group discussions and participatory co-creation workshops, we answer these questions from a multi-level perspective for the ongoing development of virtual fencing in two German grassland farming regions as comparative cases and discuss the implications of our results for the analysis of power and legitimacy as political science key categories. References Bos, Jacqueline M., Bernice Bovenkerk, Peter H. Feindt, and Ynte K. van Dam. 2018. "The Quantified Animal: Precision Livestock Farming and the Ethical Implications of Objectification." Food Ethics 2 (1):77-92. Coenen, Lars, Paul Benneworth, and Bernhard Truffer. 2012. "Toward a Spatial Perspective on Sustainability Transitions." Research Policy 41 (6):968-79. Contesse, Maria, Jessica Duncan, Katharine Legun, and Laurens Klerkx. 2021. "Unravelling Non-Human Agency in Sustainability Transitions." Technological Forecasting and Social Change 166:120634. Derwort, Pim, Nicolas Jager, and Jens Newig. 2021. "How to Explain Major Policy Change Towards Sustainability? Bringing Together the Multiple Streams Framework and the Multilevel Perspective on Socio‐Technical Transitions to Explore the German “Energiewende”." Policy Studies Journal. doi:10.1111/psj.12428. Geels, Frank W. 2011. "The Multi-Level Perspective on Sustainability Transitions: Responses to Seven Criticisms." Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions 1 (1):24-40. Smith, Adrian, and Andy Stirling. 2010. "The Politics of Socio-Ecological Resilience and Sustainable Socio-Technical Transitions." Ecology and Society 15 (1):11. Umstatter, Christina. 2011. "The Evolution of Virtual Fences: A Review." Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 75 (1):10-22.