Conclusions - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 217

regarding food security and the demands of an increasing world population have shifted
policy discourse. Whereas Slee and Pinto-Correia (this volume) demonstrated the policy
shifts towards protection and consumption functions in European rural areas over the past
three decades, new terms like 'sustainable intensification' and support for the 'bio-
economy' have recently permeated EU research calls. It is now generally acknowledged
that productivist agricultural and rural pathways have continued unabated in most areas of
the world, and some are even beginning to refer to 'neo-productivist' pathways, sparked
by demands for further intensification of agricultural spaces through global population
growth; the use of food crops for production of biofuels; changing diets towards meat and
dairy products in transition economies; and diminishing yields in parts of the world linked
to climate change (Burton and Wilson, 2012; Perkins, 2012). These processes will
continue to influence future transitions towards the sustainability of the European
countryside, in particular where they exacerbate the competition between production,
consumption and protection functions in rural spaces.
In the light of this policy shift towards the productive function of agriculture, it is
particularly important to continue to develop the MLP for use in relation to agricultural -
sector transitions. The findings from this research demonstrate the utility of the MLP for
assessing production-oriented transition processes, as well as drawing attention to the role
of enabling technologies such as IT. The empirical application of the MLP to emerging
transition processes has also revealed a number of important concepts that will benefit
from ongoing research. In particular, hybridity , resulting from cross-sectoral interaction,
was found to be central to the processes of transition, leading to the formation of niche-
tandems, hybrid actors and markets, retro-innovation, and resulting in regime graffiting of
external policy structures. The findings, thus, demonstrate the need for further
development of multiple regime interaction within the MLP, in order to better understand
the development of non-technological transition processes. To date, the few studies which
exist typically address interactions between regimes defined within a single sector (e.g.
Geels, 2007; Raven and Verbong, 2007; Konrad et al. , 2008); whereas the multifunctional
nature of the agricultural sector lends itself particularly to cross-sectoral development. As
such, MLP research could also usefully be integrated with the substantial body of
literature on multifunctional agriculture in Europe, and rural development more broadly
(through concepts of social capital, social exclusion and regional development). These
literatures, in turn, would benefit from the utility of the MLP for addressing change at
multiple levels, and for highlighting the role of technology in transition processes.
There are also important issues of space and scale that need to be considered in future
research on sustainability transitions. Our analysis has demonstrated the regional
specificity of such transitions, and the need to locate them in specific geographical
locations (in contrast to MLP approaches which tend to follow the development of
technology a-spatially). Many of the cases studied represent the proliferation of
innovations developed elsewhere, and were influenced by transition processes and
technological developments from outside of the agricultural sector. These secondary
transition processes require further conceptual development, particularly for the
agricultural sector where, as Darnofer et al. (this volume) note, radical transition is less
likely owing to the complexity of the system.