Exploring Sustainability Outcomes of Agricultural Digitalisation in European Living Labs

Agricultural digitalisation influences environmental, economic, and social domains, and generates system-wide effects that are unknown, unintended and complex. There is a need to study outcomes of digitalisation to steer agrifood systems towards long-term sustainability goals. The main aim of this chapter is to explore outcomes of agricultural digitalisation across economic, social, and environmental domains, and interpret them through the multi system-level lens of the CODECS conceptual framework. This framework provides an entryway to systematically address the costs and benefits of digitalisation. With data collected through participatory stakeholder workshops in European living labs, we link environmental, economic and social outcomes of digitalisation to different system-levels. We explore what insights emerge from linking contexts, domains, and system-levels to understand risks and opportunities of agricultural digitalisation. This approach can make visible the indirect, unintended, and long-term effects of digitalisation. Moreover, it demonstrates digitalisation as iterative process that reshapes environmental, economic, and social domains and feeds back into the trajectory of digitalisation itself. Finally, we highlight the value of contextual variability in policymaking for responsible digitalisation to ensure designing pathways that are technologically innovative, socially inclusive, economically viable, and environmentally sustainable.