Exploring co-production through engagement between scientists and producers in an agricultural living lab: A case study in Canada

Abstract

Agricultural living labs are initiatives where agricultural researchers work with commercial producers to test innovations and management practices under real world scenarios. In Canada, living labs across aim to use a co-production model across the research design and implementation cycle. This model is meant to combine the knowledge and experiences of producers, researchers, and key industry stakeholders. While a key component of co-production is engagement between producers and scientists, this process has not been widely studied in living labs. We developed a concept map for researcher-producer engagement based on identified success factors for living labs and used this to interview participants in Living Lab New Brunswick (11 agricultural producers and 3 scientists). Our results highlight the trade-offs of high trust in producer engagement in living labs and the influence of programmatic design features in informing engagement. Ultimately, our results showcase the challenges of building early engagement in co-production processes and how structural processes such as project scale and institutional incentives can complicate collaborative research. Living labs represent a collaborative research approach that aims to co-develop, test, and evaluate relevant practices to producers. Our results showcase the design and institutional opportunities and challenges in building engagement for co-production, providing considerations for other practitioners building engagement in co-production processes with rural agricultural communities.