Enrolling advisers in governing privatised agricultural extension in Australia: challenges for the innovation system

This paper is an inquiry into the process of setting up a national, multi-stakeholder project collaboration aimed at stimulating the role of the private sector in the Australian agricultural extension and innovation systems. Following description of the project’s action research design and use of a theoretical framework adapted from agricultural innovation systems (AIS) scholarship, the paper discusses the challenges the project faces in pursuing its aim of establishing an innovation platform to reframe current RD&E practices and governance arrangements towards an enhanced agricultural innovation system based on the collaboration of multiple actors. The paper describes these emergent challenges and initial project responses. In this way, the paper addresses the project as an ‘innovation platform in action’, offering to progress understanding of how to advance the establishment of innovation platforms within situated AIS more widely