Twentieth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability

Abstract

This study creates a social, ecological, and technological framework capable of characterise interactions to steer developments within the context of Agriculture 4.0. By drawing insights from the Green Revolution (GR) and framing it as a “political myth”, we scrutinize the class-based mechanisms that underpinned agricultural modernisation, shedding light on concealed and persistent challenges. While the GR tried to address food security, it also exacerbated wealth disparities and ecological degradation. Thus, when embarking on a new era of agricultural transformation (Agriculture 4.0), we advocate for a systems understanding informed by past lessons. We propose a local-level analysis as the foundation for a scoping review, intending to integrate – nest - Ostrom’s Social-Ecological Systems Framework (SESF) and the Multi-Level-Perspective (MLP) of technological transitions. The analytical description achieved by the novel social-ecological-technological systems framework will better equip decision-making at multiple (sequential) levels. While giving a localised systems view, it engages on the systems dynamics adjacent to development strategies of climate change mitigation and adaptation and favours understanding for impact evaluation. It is not the ambition of this first exploratory article to elaborate an in-depth application of the framework; and the results are discussed in general terms by delving onto the evolving roles and ideas orbiting ‘automata’ technological development of artificial intelligence and machine learning in rice. Hence, further applications of the framework into local farming systems are still needed. And its integration with other methodologies, such as the life cycle assessment, should also be structurally pursued.