1. Introduction
With the growing market demand for quality and diversification of agricultural products, there is an urgent need for innovation in agricultural production models and optimisation of production structures. New types of agriculture, such as organic agriculture, biological agriculture, natural agriculture, ecological agriculture, circular agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and intelligent agriculture, have been proposed one after another [
1]. Among them, the ecological–agricultural model, which aims at water and soil conservation, environmental protection, improvement of green vegetation, rational adjustment of economic and crop structures, and protection of ecological balance, has been generally recognised and adopted as an agricultural development strategy in countries or regions around the world [
2].
Agricultural innovation systems (AISs) are considered a fundamental approach to assess the mechanisms of agricultural science. The AIS view of agricultural innovation as a process in which technologies, practices, and institutions work together in a coordinated manner with multiple networks provides a perspective on the innovation process in agriculture. It explores the organisational, technological, and institutional innovations of AIS in terms of the evolution of innovation systems, the behaviour of innovation actors, and innovation network linkages [
3]. This new perspective is not the result of knowledge transfer, but a continuous process of social, technological, and scientific cooperation of regional and higher-level systems that affect productivity and innovation performance [
4]. The AIS theory was originated by P. Cooke of Cardiff University, UK, who proposed the regional innovation system theory in 1992, suggesting that a regional innovation system consists of actors in innovation activities, the linkages and operational mechanisms between actors, and environmental factors affecting innovation [
5]. Later, AIS was considered a network of organisations, enterprises, and individuals, focusing on the dissemination of new products with economic use, new processes, and new forms of organisation to be disseminated and diffused within the system, together with the promotion of agricultural development by relevant institutions and policies. The composition of the AIS structural framework is consistent with that of the regional innovation system, which is based on innovation actors, innovation networks, and innovation environment elements. Numerous studies have viewed agricultural innovation as a systems project that includes the synergy of all links in the industrial production chain—all relevant sectors and stakeholders—while AIS is a synergistic system of all these actors and their innovation content, and its synergistic medium is a network organisation based on social relations interacting in a complex dynamic environment [
6]. According to the innovation systems methodology research system, technology supply push, participatory development, induced innovation, and innovation systems are the main ways to improve AIS, and these also address the application of agricultural innovation methods at national, regional, and sectoral levels [
7].
In summary, innovation has always been the core of agricultural development. While most of the current literature on agricultural innovation has focused on agricultural technology innovation and its diffusion, the measurement of agricultural innovation has mostly focused on investment or input–output black-box approaches, while less attention has been paid to the macro and micro factors involved in the innovation process, such as the evolution of the form and action of actors, the evolution of policy and legal frameworks, the characteristics of knowledge flows, and so on, so that research on the evolutionary mechanism of agricultural actors in the network organisation of AIS been largely neglected. Therefore, this study proposes the concept of the EAIS, analysing ecological–agricultural innovation from the theoretical systems and analytical perspectives of AIS, taking a less-developed region within a developed city—Chongming Eco-Island, in Shanghai—as an example, it empirically analyses the structural characteristics and mechanism of EAIS evolution with the help of a research questionnaire and interview data, with a view to exploring the direction of EAIS development in developing countries under the new situation. The ecological and innovation development of agriculture are both the means and ends of agricultural development, the key is to construct an innovation system that is conducive to agricultural development. This study thus aims to contribute to the further development of research on AISs and enrich the theory of regional innovation systems and explore why an ecological–agricultural innovation system can coordinate resource utilization, stabilize ecosystems, and bring excellent production environments and product quality, fostering the achievement of ecological security and sustainable development in agriculture.
The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. In
Section 1 we introduce the significance and main purposes of this research. In
Section 2, we review the history and nature of the AIS concept and construct an analytical framework for the evolution of EAIS based on innovation systems.
Section 3 details the research methodology, research cases, and data sources of this study.
Section 4 analyses the evolutionary features and mechanisms of EAIS at the micro, meso, and macro levels, describing the analysis process and results. Finally, in
Section 5, the findings and perspectives of this study are summarised, the potential uses of the framework are presented, and further directions for future research are discussed.
2. Theoretical Framework
The development of agricultural innovation system theory has evolved from the national innovation system (NIS), regional innovation system (RIS), national agricultural research system (NARS), and agricultural knowledge information system (AKIS) to the present AIS. AIS is an agricultural organisational and innovation system consisting of diverse innovation actors, networked innovation processes, and integrated innovation goals, and has been increasingly applied to analyse the combined organisation of technological, social, and regulatory innovation in agriculture [
6]. Its ideas focus on understanding the interactive behaviour of various actors in the innovation process, as well as the impact of policies and organisational institutions on these actors, and it and its concepts have been commonly applied to a number of countries, sectors, regions, or specific industries. Whereas early AIS emphasised economic contributions and private sector involvement over sustainability, today AIS conceptualises agricultural innovation as a system of interaction and learning between multiple stakeholders, including research organisations and non-research participants such as farmers, the private sector, civil society organisations, and policy institutions. The evolutionary elements of AIS development are an integrated understanding that includes both social culture and economic foundations, globalisation trends, and regional coordination of development environments, as well as regulatory factors that facilitate the enhancement of innovation capacity, while also being influenced by the relevant role of regional elements. These elements create informal and complex social relations within a limited area by agricultural actors (nodes) through synergies and collective learning processes among themselves, forming a self-organising system with discontinuities and ultimately constituting an integrated innovation system, following a socio-ecological evolutionary mechanism [
3].
Constructing an AIS to explore mismatches and systemic failures between organisations, elements, and their linkages with government policies will help improve innovation performance and overall competitiveness, and scientifically guide the development of agricultural innovation policies. A mature innovation system or model has gradually emerged through ‘innovation intermediaries’ or brokers [
8]. Technological innovation, including technology development and diffusion, is the most important innovation activity in AIS [
9]. Compared with innovation in other fields, agricultural technological innovation has more prominent public goods attributes and is more regional and seasonal, which determines the special and important status of technological innovation in AIS. Organisational innovation in agriculture can make agricultural actors more adaptable to the market. It involves adjustment to original organisational arrangements, and its essence is to produce a more efficient new model or organisational vehicle. Organisational innovation in agriculture has undergone different evolutionary patterns in the course of its development, mainly involving the entrepreneurisation of farmers, the institutionalisation of agricultural organisations, and the spinoff of agricultural institutions. Agricultural regulatory innovation is the key to the evolution of the AIS and the reorganisation and coordination of the various elements of agricultural innovation. Agricultural innovation activities are influenced by regional resources and regulatory environment. Positive incentives for agricultural innovation adopted by government or agricultural management agencies—such as upgrades to the agricultural policy system, the implementation of preferential tax policies for innovation actors such as agricultural enterprises, and the strengthening of patent protection for agricultural innovation—are all regulatory innovations in agricultural development [
10]. Innovation actors mainly include agricultural enterprises, university research institutions, farmers, government agencies, and intermediary services. From the perspective of spatial organisation, innovation benefits to a large extent from the combined effect of geographical proximity or clustering of innovation actors and resulting linkages. As shown in
Figure 1, this proximity and interconnectedness give rise to a new form of spatial organisation, namely, innovation networks. An innovation network is a relatively stable network of relationships between innovation actors such as enterprises, universities, research institutions, market intermediaries, industry organisations, local governments, and individuals in a specific field, formed through long-term communication and cooperation between them in multiple channels, ways, and levels, and is conceived as consisting of innovation actors, innovation resources, relationship channels, and space. Innovation actors in the AIS gradually form a relatively stable innovation network through formal or informal communication and cooperation in the local environment.
AIS approaches have remained fairly focused on innovation in the agricultural sector and have often concentrated on the agricultural technology innovation paradigm, without yet taking a multifunctional research approach to agricultural systems and organisations or focusing explicitly on eco-efficiency [
3]. Mainstream and alternative agriculture are very different in form and concept, making the study of EAIS important for the innovative development and sustainability of ecological agriculture [
11]. AIS is the collaboration of multiple elements to achieve innovation; that is, AIS is a ‘conceptual framework’ developed from a systems theory perspective, emphasising the interaction of the various constituent elements involved in the generation and exchange of knowledge, technology, or products in a social, economic, and regulatory context. This means that the interaction of stakeholders in the AIS is a key factor in the evolution of the system [
12]. Therefore, the analysis of the AIS should be carried out from a systemic perspective. This paper refers to the analytical frameworks of many scholars on the formation or evolution of the AIS [
13], and constructed an analytical framework for the evolution of the EAIS that includes the three levels of ‘actor’ + ‘network’ + ‘institution’, which emphasises that the AIS includes all technological innovation, organisational innovation, and regulatory innovation involved in actor behaviour, actor relations, and the regulatory environment, and also emphasises the evolution of innovation systems in synergy between the three levels (
Figure 2).
3. Methodology and Data
3.1. Methodology
In the field of economic geography, social network analysis (SNA) has become a mature set of norms and methods widely used in the study of industrial clusters, enterprise spatial structure, regional innovation systems, urban spatial structure, tourism spatial structure optimisation, and ecosystem management services [
14]. In this context, the AIS research has placed great emphasis on the SNA method [
15].
Degree centrality is a common metric in SNA. The degree centrality of a node is an indicator that reflects the position of the node in the network and refers to the number of other nodes connected to the node. The greater the number of connected nodes, the higher the degree centrality, the greater the innovation resources and innovation capacity, the greater the ability to obtain information and resources from other nodes, and the greater the network importance and influence (as in the following formula).
where
Xij and
Xji are values of 0 or 1 representing whether node
j has a relationship with node
i, and mutual out-degree and in-degree relations between node
i and
j. As degree centrality can be divided into outward and inward centrality, it is generally referred to in terms of out-degree and in-degree centrality. The out-degree represents the outward linkage emanating from that node, which influences other nodes, while the in-degree represents the opposite, influenced by other nodes. In this study, out-degree represents the output of innovation resources from an agricultural actor to other actors, whereas in-degree represents the input of innovation resources to this agricultural actor by other actors.
3.2. Research Case
Chongming Eco-Island is located at the mouth of the Yangtze River; it is the world’s largest estuarine alluvial island and the third-largest island in China, and functions as the ‘ecological barrier’ of the Yangtze River (
Figure 3). Chongming was clearly positioned as an ecological island in the Shanghai Urban Master Plan (1999–2020), approved by the State Council in 2001. In 2014, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released the International Assessment Report on Chongming Eco-Island, which comprehensively assessed the results achieved by Chongming in three major areas of sustainable development: environment, economy, and society. The report concluded that the core values of the ecological construction of Chongming Island reflected the green economy concept of the UNEP, affirming the transformation of Chongming and in particular of family-based, fragmented agricultural operations to scale and the ecological transformation of agricultural production methods, and asserted that Chongming’s eco-agriculture was coming of age. In 2017, Chongming was approved as one of China’s first agro-ecological development pioneer zones, and the ecological agriculture and rural leisure tourism industry ushered in a booming period of development. In 2020, Chongming reached 267 certified green food enterprises in the plantation industry, with a total of 460 products. The green food certification rate in Chongming has exceeded 90%, accounting for 70% of the total number of green food certifications in Shanghai. The China Agricultural Green Development Report 2020, released in Beijing in 2021 by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the China Agricultural Green Development Research Association, shows that Chongming’s agricultural green development index has reached 90.01, ranking first in China. Chongming’s eco-agriculture represents the highest level in China, innovative development and ecological development are the key to its success. Therefore, it is very reliable to take Chongming’s eco-agriculture as the research case of EAIS.
3.3. Data
This study used SNA and its analysis software UCINET 6 to analyse the characteristics and structure of network links between case industry organisations, and focused on the value of information and control advantages represented by the location characteristics of the network structure in which each agricultural actor is located. This method focuses on analysing the relationships between network members and exploring the impact they will have on the actions of network members, focusing more on the relational data of the actors in the network rather than the attribute data. Thus, in the AIS research, we treated actors such as farmers, agro-related enterprises, agricultural research institutions, universities, and agricultural associations as individual units, clarified the overall structure of the network based on different relational attributes, explored the position of each agricultural actor in the network, identified key nodes in the network, and identified specific sub-groups.
With the support of the Chongming Agricultural and Rural Committee and the Development and Reform Commission of Shanghai, we travelled to Chongming for more than 20 days of field research in August and December 2020 and March and April 2021. We approached Chongming’s Eco-Agriculture respondents to conduct semi-structured interviews, instructing them to indicate what organisations they had relationships with for product distribution, market regulation, technology diffusion, market collaboration, innovation collaboration, and organisational affiliation and record the responses on a questionnaire form. In the process of collecting data on the attributes and relationships of the participants in the social network, we first selected the heads of representative agricultural enterprises for interviews and then identified the heads of organisations, such as farmers, cooperatives, government departments, intermediaries, or service organisations with which the enterprise had business or cooperative relationships and asked the heads of the organisations and the farmers to fill in the number of node units with which they had relationship for each relationship question. A total of 282 respondents were interviewed in the main rural areas of Chongming’s eco-agricultural production and operation, covering all sectors related to ecological agriculture in Chongming, and 276 valid questionnaires were obtained, which were collated into the data and materials required for the SNA analysis. Specifically, the respondents were asked to answer the following questions:
(I) What is your occupation and what is the organisation you work with?
(II) What does your job entail and what is the business of the organisation to which you belong?
(III) What are the departments of the organisation you belong to?
(IV) Which organisations have a subordinate relationship with the organisation you belong to?
(V) Which organisations have a business or partnership relationship with you or the organisation you belong to?
(VI) What are your or your organisation’s sources of technology, products, and information?
(VII) What local policy regimes and regulatory measures affect your or your organisation’s production and business or R & D activities?
(VIII) What are your or your organisation’s future production, business plan, and development directions?
5. Conclusions
Based on a review of the literature related to the AIS and agricultural innovation, this study constructed a theoretical framework for the evolution of EAIS and analysed the characteristics and mechanisms of EAIS evolution at the micro, meso, and macro levels, taking the ecological agriculture of Chongming Eco-Island in Shanghai, China as an example to provide a theoretical basis for the construction and management of EAIS in developing countries. The main findings of this study are as follows.
First, the evolutionary structure of EAIS includes three levels: the micro level of actors, the meso level of the innovation network, and the macro level of institutions. The evolutionary content of the three levels together forms the evolutionary content of EAIS. Therefore, the evolutionary process of the EAIS is the evolution of innovation and ecological evolution of each ecological–agricultural producer and operator under the regulation of the ecological–agricultural regulatory actors and the innovation-intermediary effect of the ecological–agricultural innovation-intermediary actors, including the organisational spinoff activities at the micro level, the innovation network evolution process at the meso level, and the regulatory innovation activities at the macro level.
Second, the innovation content of the EAIS includes organisational spinoffs, innovation networks, and regulatory innovation. EAIS meets the huge market demand and keeps up with the accelerating pace of technological innovation through organisational spinoffs, and helps agricultural actors to integrate quickly into ecological regulations; adapts to regulations and market changes through innovation networks; efficiently obtains resources such as knowledge overflow, information dissemination, and technological cooperation; and establishes a set of scientific regulatory systems and operational norms to guarantee an innovative and ecologically sound development path for ecological agriculture in Chongming.
Third, the evolutionary mechanism of EAIS is the diffusion and effectiveness of innovation resources and ecological regulation in the inter-actor network, including innovation-intermediary assistance and the ecological regulation of the actor as well as the resource synergy of the innovation network. At the micro level, ecological–agricultural producers and operators are continuously spun off with the expansion of industry scale under market orientation, technology promotion, and regulation. At the meso level, all actors actively seek specialised associations to obtain innovation resources, forming an innovation network. At the macro level, ecological–agricultural regulatory actors incorporate all actors into the ecological regulation system so that the evolutionary path of the EAIS is regulated in cleaner production.
6. Discussion
This study makes a new breakthrough in its analysis of the structure and mechanism of the EAIS evolution, and the theoretical framework constructed can be valuable for guiding the ecologically sound and innovative development of agriculture in developing countries, providing a theoretical basis for government policymakers to construct or manage the EAIS. In terms of theoretical framework construction, innovation system framework construction, innovation actors, innovation networks, and innovation dimensions were the themes of this study. Many scholars have proposed different AIS research frameworks to explore the structural levels and composition of the AIS [
26,
27], explore its deep-rooted principles and operational mechanisms, and apply case studies to explore the specific behaviours of various sectors. With regard to influencing factors, the government sector plays a decisive role in the direction of the AIS evolution, but sometimes the private sector and intermediary organisations can have an even more important impact on the AIS [
28,
29,
30], and further analysis of non-regulatory factors should be expanded in the future. At the same time, coordination of the claims of various groups and stakeholders in the AIS has also been the focus of scholarly research, with an exploration of how power dynamics among stakeholders affect participatory agricultural innovation initiatives, attempting to find solutions in technology, markets, regulation, and other practices and frameworks [
31,
32,
33,
34]. How innovation actors achieve collaborative innovation through innovation networks is key to the sustainable operation of the EAIS, while the creation and adoption of knowledge within and across actors, path dependence and path disruption of technology, and the influence of external market choices and government promotion are the intrinsic mechanisms by which they can evolve collaboratively. Finally, although this study supports the heterogeneous characteristics of the AIS [
35,
36], because the formation and evolution of the AIS cannot be separated from the influence of the regional socio-cultural environment, different regional contexts, resource endowments, and technological capabilities will affect the evolutionary patterns of the AIS, and thus it is necessary to research the evolution of the EAIS in the economic, demographic, and institutional environments of various regions in the future to enhance the EAIS approach’s universality and expand its theoretical system and scope. However, to do so, the applicability of the AIS methods to specific regions and industries also still needs to be improved, and exploring the regional rootedness of the EAIS will thus be an important aspect of future research.