Sustainable digitalisation - a system thinking approach for determining costs and benefits in the agri-sector

The digital transformation of agriculture is widely promoted as a pathway to sustainability, yet the actual outcomes of digitalisation remain uncertain and context-dependent. As such, technology uptake among businesses can have positive impacts on individual farms, while the aggregated outcomes of digitalisation involving multiple farms and multi-actors in associated networks are fully uncertain. The novelty of this research is the introduction of an approach to investigate costs and benefits in different contexts at different levels of digitalisation. Objective The main objective is to introduce a systems-based approach for assessing sustainable digitalisation by differentiating outcomes across multiple levels of analysis. This approach is designed to address the common pitfall of generalising impacts such as assuming large-scale effects based on evidence limited to the farm level. Methods This research is based on a scoping literature review in the European Union Horizon Europe project called CODECS, which is highly suited for interdisciplinary research with multiple topics. Results and conclusion A framework has been designed to clarify the needs for distinguishing costs and benefits of digitalisation across three interconnected system levels: digitised socio-physical systems, socio-cyber-physical systems, and governance-cyber-ecological systems. To deal with complexities at each level, the framework integrates internal and external drivers, contextual conditions, and value-based perspectives, which all will influence outcomes of sustainability assessments. Significance The framework offers a practical tool for researchers, policymakers, and innovation actors, to deal with the complexities of digital transitions in agriculture, to reach at sustainable digitalisation outcomes in a long term regionally, as well as in a short-term locally, by enhanced understanding of the needs for distinguished sustainability assessment applications to reach at more accurate costs and benefits.