Contribution of Social Network Analysis for evaluating Impacts of Science-Based Research and Innovation Program: The example of the farmers’ conversion to organic crop production in Camargue

This contribution is a methodological research paper that aims to demonstrate the relevance of undertaking a Social Network Analysis (SNA) for ex-post evaluating Impacts of Science-Based Research and Innovation Program (ISRIP) in the agricultural sector. Our study is based on the ISRIP Method, which is derived from the Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis (PIPA). The ISRIP Method is characterized by the organization of stakeholders’ workshops; and SNA is part of the evaluation process. In this paper, we substantially re-question the rationale of undertaking a SNA to help evaluate the impacts, role and contribution of the research through the example of farmers’ conversion to organic crop production in the French Camargue. Our analysis shows the interest of SNA for confirming or contradicting stakeholders’ statements on relationships issues as well as investigating the accuracy of possible alternative explanations. Particularly, SNA was greatly useful for exploring the presence of underlying mechanisms to the hypothesized pathway links, e.g. for identifying how a research activity X could lead to the availability of a new technic Y. We also demonstrate the importance of considering impacts of research on the survival capacity of the network: we show that the organic network presents a better resilience and robustness than the conventional one