For example, in 2018 the share of total organic agricultural land, including arable farming and horticulture, was relatively low in the Netherlands, but much larger in Denmark and Austria, respectively 9.8% and 24.7% . For dairy farming, the share of organic dairy cows in the Netherlands was 2.3% in 2017, and in respectively Denmark and Austria 12.3% and 21.2% . Although consistent and reliable statistics on organic markets and commodity breakdown is still non-existent,some organic consumption patterns show marked differences. In 2019 Danish and Austrian consumers purchased respectively € 344 and € 215 per capita on organic food, while Dutch consumers spend €71 per capita.Finally, the market share of organic dairy in 2019 was ca. 21% in Denmark, 16% in Austria and only 4.1% in the Netherlands .Within the full range of organic farming , each can be identified as single niches. Organic dairy farming therefore is a niche, and in transition studies niches are often defined as “protected spaces where new socio-technical practices can develop” .A transition is a long term, complex and multidimensional process, where a societal subsystem radically or incrementally changes . The sociotechnical regime is a central concept within transition research and defined as “a relatively stable configuration of institutions, techniques and artefacts, as well as rules, practices and networks that determine the development and use of technologies” . Sustainable transitions can be seen as a long-term goal, and therefore what is considered ‘sustainable’ can change over time. Changes within a regime occur at different dimensions such as technological, material, organizational, institutional, political, economic, and socio-cultural.
This is due to the fact that established technologies and practices are highly intertwined within these systems . As a result, numerous difficulties in the upscaling of organic dairy farming could be identified, related to organizational, ebb flow tray technological and knowledge exchange issues , power relations and a variety of other institutional problems . Innovation system frameworks have shown to be useful to study the transition of agricultural systems towards more sustainability . More specifically the Technological Innovation System is used to assess the barriers and drivers of a niche as it grows and institutionalizes to further challenge the existing regime . A TIS is defined as a set of networks of actors, infrastructure and institutions that jointly interact in a specific technological field that contribute to the generation, diffusion and utilization of variants of a new technology and/or a new product . Central to a TIS is that innovation and diffusion is steered both by individual and collective actions and as such includes an analysis of system functions. Next to mapping the structure of the innovation system , it is therefore important to identify the most important key processes that are needed to build up the respective innovation system . These key processes are coined in Hekkert et al. as the seven system functions and can be mapped throughout time in order to identify system dynamics . In this paper we apply the TIS framework to the Dutch case of organic dairy farming in order to understand what may hamper upscaling.
To identify potential leverage points, the development of the organic dairy sector in Denmark and Austria will be studied alongside as examples of countries in which the organic niche is much more advanced. For this study we use a mixture of information sources, i.e., a literature review, a newspaper review, and semi-structured interviews of key stakeholders within the organic dairy value chains from the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria. In the study of agricultural transitions, slight adaptations to TIS have been made in the past, such as the Agriculture Innovation System , where innovation is seen as an outcome of the different interactions between the actors, institutions, and the economic, environmental and societal systems and as such less focused on the development of new technologies but rather on organizational and institutional change . Indeed, the emphasis within the organic farming transition is not only about the technological aspects of the innovation, but also about the understanding of the system dynamics and performance of a system within the wider ‘conventional agricultural practices’ . As such, in the current study AIS was applied, while using the functional aspects of TIS. The TIS uses five steps to analyze the functioning of an innovation system based on Wieczorek and Hekkert , i.e., the analysis of the structural components of the system such as actors, institutions, networks and interactions, infrastructures , the functional analysis and the identification of system problems, and formulation of systemic instruments.
The analytical framework of TIS contributes to the understanding of the complex nature of the diffusion of a niche, such as organic farming, by analysing the obstacles that may block this process . As such, problems that are identified from the coupled structural functional analysis may hinder the diffusion of an innovation and are referred to as systemic problems . In this respect, Weber and Rohracher identified three types of failures of transformative change. i) Market failures that are linked to the niche level and may include leakage effects and the higher costs associated with sustainable production. ii) System failures that could affect infrastructures such as a lack of knowledge, capability problems such as competences, and institutional failures such as a regime that strongly hinders the uptake. This can be further divided into soft institutional failures that relate to habits and culture, and hard institutional failures that refer to laws and regulations that block the diffusion of an innovation. Finally, iii) transformation failures referring to directional failure by a lack of a shared vision, weak consumer support , policy coordination failure and reflexivity failure that signifies a lack of long term commitment and learning ability. To gain a better understanding and to identify the current state of development of the organic dairy sector, including value chain actors, first literature reviews were conducted on organic dairy farming in the Netherlands, Denmark and Austria. Literature searches were performed in Google Scholar, Science Direct and Scopus.This search string includes more than organic dairy since the research is focused on transitions rather than practices alone.
Related governmental documents and websites were also examined. Once theoretical saturation of the literature was achieved the results were used to formulate questions for interviews. Second, semi-structured interviews were conducted with interviewees in all three countries. Most interviews lasted between 30 and 60 min and were carried out face to face or over the telephone. In total 23 interviews were performed with experts of the organic dairy sector in the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark . The sample included representatives from governmental bodies, NGOs, universities, farmers, processors and retailers. The 13 Dutch interviewees were asked questions which were formulated around the seven functions of the TIS framework . To strengthen the solutions found in the literature review for Denmark and Austria, 10 interviews were held with experts within the Danish and Austrian agricultural regime. Questions were related to the seven functions, and the observed barriers. Also country specific solutions to barriers were identified and are further referred to as enabling factors. Most experts were found after a review of relevant policy documents from government and industry. Using snowball sampling subsequent interviewees were found. Finally other relevant stakeholders were found by visiting a trade fair . In total 63 experts were contacted . Third, the Lexis Nexis search engine was used to retrieve relevant Dutch newspaper articles, published between 1991 and 2018 on organic farming to get a better understanding of the public debates and discourses on organic farming in the Netherlands. The primary search using‘biologische landbouw’ resulted in 8157 newspaper items, though many of those are published multiple times in different imprints of national newspaper agencies, or published papers that did not have a link to Dutch organic farming . Based on relevant article headings and removing duplicates a corpus of 260 papers was retrieved as pdf documents. Within the corpus search strings such as ‘government’, ‘cabinet’, ‘Minister’, ‘organic policy’, ‘retail’, ‘supermarket’, and ‘consumer’ were used to retrieve relevant information.
The information flow of the different steps are depicted in Fig. 1. The grounded theory method was used to analyze the interviews. Grounded theory is “a systematic method for constructing a theoretical analysis from data”,flood and drain tray and as such an iterative process between data collection analysis and theory building . An initial coding framework for the barriers in the Netherlands was created through an iterative process in which the seven functions were used as categories. After the first interviews were transcribed the coding framework was created. An iterative comparison between the data and concepts was made to convert the verbal data into barriers. Adoptions to the framework were made until theoretical saturation was achieved. The coding framework for Austria and Denmark was created based on the enabling factors found in literature. After an interview was performed, the transcribed data was coded. The coding framework was adjusted when more interviews where established. By using this iterative process possible missing enabling factors were added into the coding framework. The barriers found through the coding process were further analyzed to provide the most common and important barriers. To decide which barriers were key in the development, a scoring system for the functions and barriers was developed. Every mentioned barrier was scored within the coding framework with value 1, if a respondent did not mention a barrier, the barrier got the value of 0. To calculate how often one barrier was mentioned, we divided the number of times a barrier was mentioned by the sample size and multiplied by 100%. The Dutch sample size was 13, the sample size in Denmark and Austria was 5. To calculate how often a function was mentioned we divided all mentioned barriers within a function to the total mentioned barriers and multiplied by 100%. Using a three-point Likert scale the priority of the various barriers was assessed. This scale divides the barriers in three levels of priority according to the number of times a barrier was mentioned by the respondents. If less than 33% of the respondents mentioned a barrier it was of low priority , between 34 and 66% the barrier was of medium priority and 67–100% was of high priority . Following this, each barrier was linked to one of the seven functions. To get a clear understanding which barrier resisted the development the most, the barriers starting from medium priority or higher within the most important functions were evaluated in the results.
After linking each specific barrier to the structure of the system, the systemic problem can be identified. This systemic problem will point at which function mostly hindering the development and upscaling of the organic dairy innovation system. Based on the interviews, 19 barriers could be identified, while these barriers were mentioned in total 92 times by the Dutch respondents. These barriers are linked to the seven TIS functions in such way that 7% of the barriers was associated with the function entrepreneurial activities, 5% with the function knowledge development, 0% with the function knowledge exchange, 34% with the function guidance of the search, 37% with the function market formation, 15% with the function resource mobilization and 2% with the function counteract resistance to change . Since 1991, in Europe, including the Netherlands, organic farming has been institutionalized by the EC Regulation 2092/91 . This regulation includes, amongst others, strict rules regarding use of fertilizers, pesticides etc., while the organic certification guarantees farmers a higher milk price. The share of organic dairy farmers in the Netherlands slowly increased from 1.1% in 2001 to ca. 2.9% in 2019. Milk production per cow is lower, but due to higher organic milk prices farmers receive a higher income per labor hour . Since 2013 organic milk prices are decoupled from conventional milk prices, which also resulted in a larger difference because conventional milk prices strongly dropped after the milk quota abolishment in 2015 and subsequently a larger supply.In 2020 organic farmers received 49.5 Euro per 100 kg milk, which is 12.5 eurocent higher per kg milk than conventional farmers.Because organic milk prices are less volatile, income of organic farmers is more stable.