Scale dynamics of grassroots innovations through parallel pathways of transformative change

An important issue for the study of grassroots innovations and the geography of sustainability transitions is how<br/>scales affect transformative change. In this paper wewill address the questions of 1) how grassroots innovations<br/>for sustainable agriculture are scaled and 2) the consequences of crossing different scales and levels on the characteristics<br/>of the grassroots innovation. We propose a framework of five different scales to analyze the development<br/>of grassroots innovations and we apply this framework on the long-term development of an agricultural<br/>grassroots innovation movement that pioneered innovative dairy farming practices combined with landscape<br/>management. The results show how the initial innovation coalition built around low external input farming became<br/>fragmented. Each of the resulting new grassroots innovation coalitions used different strategies for<br/>upscaling and outscaling that depended on differences in their (regional) contexts and institutional support.<br/>The grassroots innovation thus developed along three parallel, at times intersecting, innovation pathways. The<br/>distributed agency of multiple actor groups working in parallel leads to a continuous renegotiating of meaning<br/>that poses a challenge to the idea of planned processes of outscaling and upscaling of grassroots innovation