ABSTRACT
With digital agriculture as a path to transforming the agricultural sector in the Global South, there has been a rise in digital service provision. To counteract potentially negative ethical, social justice, and environmental impacts of digital agriculture, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been offered as a possible solution. There are, however, scant accounts of RRI in the context of digital agriculture in the Global South. To this end we consider Esoko, a leading social enterprise in Ghana which provides information services to smallholder farmers. The question arises of how the innovation process adopted by Esoko can allow for designing actionable and scalable digital solutions for targeted food systems amidst a variety of uncertainties whilst addressing issues of inclusion and responsibility. The study presents an analysis of whether and how RRI occurs under such conditions of uncertainty by studying how Esoko designs digital services that enable actionable knowledge creation in food systems. The study explores how three objects of uncertainty (strategic, institutional and substantive) impact Esoko’s capability to engage with RRI (characterised by inclusiveness, anticipation, responsiveness, and reflexivity). Our findings point to evidence of how substantive, strategic, and institutional uncertainties impact the inclusive, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsive character of innovation processes undertaken by social enterprises such as Esoko.
