In this post, Innovation as Bullshit [*], Saskia Colombant and Priscilla Claeys show how the innovation narrative, or the attempt to reclaim the term, does not serve the objectives of movements advocating for radical and rights-based food system transformation. To make this argument, the authors first explain the history of the term, followed by the critiques of it from a food sovereignty perspective. They then show why reclaiming the innovation narrative might not be worth it, inviting us instead to refuse innovation and explore alternative framings of transformation.
This article is a part of our theme on Critical Perspectives on Science, Technology, and Innovation.
Written by Saskia Colombant and Priscilla Claeys.
In 2025, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt for their contributions to understanding how technological innovation drives economic growth and progress. The award reflects a broader post-World War II trend in which innovation has been increasingly promoted by policymakers and private actors as a key solution to today’s mounting environmental, political and social challenges. Captured in mottos such as ‘innovate or die’, innovation has come to function as an imperative[1] demanding constant development and adoption of new ideas, technologies and practices. In food systems, this innovation imperative manifests itself in EU policies (see BOX 1) and UN agencies’ programs, such as the FAO[2] and UNDP.[3] Policy makers, companies and philanthropies promote food and agricultural innovations including climate-smart solutions through digital agriculture (use of remote sensors, robots, automation, drones, big data and AI to optimize water and agrochemical use), gene editing (including gene drives); the introduction of traceability tech, lab-grown meat and the use of genomics and data to personalize nutrition and diets; and apps and smart storage solutions to reduce waste. They also push for policy innovations such as multistakeholder platforms that dilute accountability and financial innovations such as carbon credits and other so-called nature-based solutions.
Actors in the food sovereignty and agroecology movements have responded to the innovation imperative by highlighting the failure of technological and corporate-driven innovations to address the structural causes of hunger and malnutrition, and the climate crisis (see more below). Activists have also tried to reclaim the term by pointing to the potential of grassroots innovations. Drawing notably on a long history of social innovation movements and research, they have argued that innovations can be social and economic in addition to technical, that agroecology is a form of innovation, and that local communities, Indigenous Peoples and peasants are innovators. However, few have fully rejected innovation as a term.
One potential consequence of the movement’s ambivalence toward innovation – tugged between rejecting one interpretation of it while reclaiming another – is an ambiguous stance on new technologies, even in situations where strong refusal may be needed. Many food sovereignty activists are skeptical about digital interventions or terrified to imagine the future of our food systems in the hands of AI, big data and Big Tech corporations. However, our movements have been slow in responding to this new threat. For instance, the Kandy Declaration adopted at the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum recognizes the risks posed by corporate technologies but does not propose any concrete action beyond fighting digital biopiracy. We are excited to see more and more activists and scholars demanding data justice, alternative tech, technological sovereignty and working towards democratizing and decolonizing data governance.[4] But we feel that more is needed to strongly and collectively resist the push to digital agriculture. We believe that one of the reasons our movements are struggling to articulate this resistance is that our collective stance on innovation is unclear.
| BOX 1 — Since the early 2010s, the emergence of the term innovation as central to food and agriculture discussions is palpable in UN and EU agendas. The FAO established an Office of Innovation in 2019 and hosts a yearly Science and Innovation Forum to drive “transformative action for sustainable agrifood systems.” Meanwhile, the 2021 UN Food Systems Summit included an ‘innovation lever’ for change and success and emphasized the need for inclusive innovations such as open-source or access to financing and technological support for new entrants.[5] In Europe, a significant portion of the EU budget is allocated to research and innovation, mainly through the Horizon Europe research funding programme – renamed in 2014 from “Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development” to “Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.” In its attempt to “close the innovation gap”[6] with the US and China and to drive “sustainable growth”, the European Commission has proposed doubling the Horizon programme’s budget for 2028-2034 to €175 billion. |
In this article, we argue that reclaiming the innovation narrative does not serve the objectives of movements for radical and rights-based food system transformation. We recognize and value the centrality of Indigenous knowledge and grassroots practices and the potential of agroecological science in building and fostering food sovereignty but fear that including them in the innovation complex impedes rather than builds societal transformation.
While agroecology is increasingly recognized as a viable pathway for the green transition in some policy spaces,[7] our food systems are being further entrenched in exploitative industrial models through market-driven technological interventions in the name of innovation and competitiveness. The innovation language in the 2022 EC communication of A New European Innovation Agenda is clear: “Innovation is essential to drive Europe’s competitiveness and to ensure the health and well-being of its citizens. […] A new wave of innovation is on its way: deep tech innovation, which is rooted in cutting edge science, technology and engineering, […]”. In this context, we must do more than reclaiming innovation. We must contest it.
Below, we present a contemporary history of innovation (1) and summarize the critique of corporate-led innovations from a food sovereignty perspective (2). We then explore why reclaiming innovation may not be worth it. To do so, we analyze how food sovereignty activists and scholars have tried to reclaim the innovation narrative (3). We argue that well-intentioned efforts to promote grassroots, agroecological or food sovereignty innovations risk depoliticizing food system transformation because they perpetuate and reinforce a series of misconceptions about societal change (4). We end with an invitation to refuse the innovation narrative and explore alternative framings of transformation that could help us imagine and build livable futures (5).
Innovation as a contemporary construct (1)
Although the word innovation dates back to antiquity, it only began to be commonly used during the Reformation (16th century). At that time, the term had only a political and social connotation. It was highly contested and above all pejorative, often used as synonym for social rebellion and to depict heretics. By the end of the 19th century, its meaning gradually shifted into a metaphor for modernity.[8] The dominant conceptualization of the term today is often attributed to Schumpeter’s late 1930s theories, where he described technological innovation as the commercialization of inventions by entrepreneurs and firms, and as the main driver of economic growth. His ideas followed a techno-determinist argument of capitalism’s growth, where technology enables productivity. Widely adopted by governments and international organizations after World War II, this dominant vision of innovation has broadly come to mean doing things differently with positive impacts and has steadily acquired the role of panacea for socioeconomic problems.
This particular understanding of innovation is embedded in the colonial and patriarchal modernity paradigm: it is inseparable from the pursuit of continuous rational improvement – progress – and the separation of humans from nature (and from our bodies and emotions) that underlies the large-scale capitalistic exploitation of people and the environment. Closely tied to Western Science, it operates as the societal application of science and research for progress, and is structured through property rights designed to protect innovations and enable their creators to claim rents over them. Today, innovation stands on its own as the very embodiment of accomplished progress, and therefore as an end in itself.
Across all sectors, including food systems, digitalization, and particularly AI, emerges as the emblem of the latest innovation wave. Both the EU and the FAO advocate for a “twin transition” in food systems – the coupling of the digital and green transition as mutually reinforcing and necessary.[9] As a result, corporate-led digitalization of food systems is being increasingly imposed as the only way forward without considering socio-environmental impacts and without public debate.
What’s wrong with innovation (2)
The innovation imperative is problematic for at least seven reasons.
- Goals: It claims to bring neutral and apolitical innovations for more productivity and efficiency. In doing so, it takes attention away from the structural and root causes of food system crises and fails to bring equity, autonomy and justice. While it promotes technological, social and economic innovations in discourse, it consistently prioritizes technological solutions.
- Actors: It only recognizes some individuals as innovators, and this recognition is shaped by class, race and gender. Those celebrated as innovators are often elites whose work is aimed at producing economic value.[10] For example, AgriFoodTech start-ups – often seen as symbols of innovations – are highly concentrated in the Global North and led by men. This selective framing obscures and diminishes the agency, contribution and practices of others, including women or racialized communities.
- Knowledge: It promotes top-down, technoscientific or expert knowledge. It undermines and ignores local, experiential, peasant, traditional, and Indigenous knowledge.
- Control: It promotes proprietary technologies that consolidate agribusiness and big tech’s corporate power. It marginalizes other more transformative alternatives and reinforces existing power dynamics. It (re)produces productivist, exploitative and unsustainable food systems.
- Innovation model: It advances a linear, top-down innovation model from scientific development to adoption. This model tends to marginalize more decentralized, context specific and participatory approaches to innovation.
- Governance: It promotes techno-solutionist, centralized approaches that are highly depoliticizing. By framing innovations as inherently positive, such approaches fail to interrogate their ultimate purpose and replace the need for public value-based deliberation. They also reinforce technocracy by framing problems as technical in nature and centering technical expertise in decision-making. The innovation imperative additionally materializes in unfair property rights regimes and in vast flows of public and private funding directed toward developing and imposing the latest technology, often without democratic processes. Digital technologies, for instance, have in the span of a few decades fully reshaped our lives, with little to no citizen participation or collective deliberation on their necessity, production, or implications.
- Colonial, modern, racialized and patriarchal: It fuels innovation systems driven by male-dominated institutions from the Global North (tech companies, engineering sectors, policy spaces) that seek to further standardize, dematerialize and commodify bodies, knowledge, beings, land and water, extract value from the Global South to the Global North, and sustain patriarchal values such as speed, competition, and efficiency. It undervalues care, collaboration, and sustainability. The resulting innovation economies extract value from gendered and racialized forms of labor without recognition or compensation. Even when branded as gender-inclusive, many innovations tend to operate within patriarchal logics, seeking to empower women within patriarchy.
How the food sovereignty movement has tried to reclaim innovation (3)
Food sovereignty activists and scholars have denounced corporate technologies for failing to address the structural causes of the food and climate crises[11] and sought to position agroecology as a key innovation capable of addressing the triple ecological, climate and food security crisis (Table 1). They have insisted that grassroots communities, Indigenous Peoples and peasants have been innovating for millennia, and that we need ‘real’ or ‘true’ innovations – not corporate-driven ones – grounded in peasant, traditional or Indigenous knowledge, and controlled by local communities. In short, they have tried to reclaim the term innovation.
| Dimension | Corporate Innovation Imperative | Food Sovereignty Innovation Alternative |
| Goal | Increase productivity and efficiency, prioritizing technologies | Technological, social or economic practices, including agroecology, for autonomy, equity, sustainability, resilience |
| Key Actors | Corporations and tech companies, research institutions | Peasants, Indigenous peoples, rural communities, participatory researchers |
| Knowledge | Top-down, technoscientific and business expert knowledge | Participatory, scientific, local, experiential, peasant, traditional, Indigenous, co-created knowledge |
| Control | Market-led, proprietary, high-input, corporate control | People-led, open-source or commons, low-input, accessible, local control |
| Innovation model | Centralized, linear, from R&D to adoption | Decentralized, experimental, grassroots, and context-specific |
| Governance | Depoliticized techno-solutionist approaches | Public deliberation to promote value-laden and people-led innovations that address specific needs |
| Equity | Patriarchal and colonial | Driven by needs, based on place, context, class and gender or aims to support autonomy, emancipation |
Food sovereignty activists have demanded and proposed inclusive, people-led and place-based innovations grounded in local knowledge and practices, and people’s struggles. Innovation processes should be driven by people’s needs and expertise, co-created rather than imposed, and support local communities’ autonomy. This requires stronger policy and funding support of grassroots innovations, social innovations, inclusive innovations, coupled innovations, and participatory research. Alternative legal and policy frameworks are also needed to ensure that innovations are just and responsible and contribute to fair and sustainable farming systems.[12] But what happens when we reframe and reclaim innovation as such, what assumptions do we perpetuate and which possibilities for change do we exclude?
Innovation as Bullshit (4)
We believe that efforts to promote food sovereignty innovations are not only failing but inadvertently contributing to legitimizing aspects of the innovation imperative that do not serve our movements. In this section, we identify six misconceptions that movements for food system transformation risk reproducing when trying to reclaim innovation. For each of these, we identify alternative discourses and practices that would be more congruent with the objectives of food sovereignty.
Misconception 1 – Isolated interventions will fix systemic issues
The first misconception is that every problem awaits its own distinct solution, and that the answers to current food systems issues, along with broader ecological and social crises, are yet to be invented, commercialized and scaled up through investments.
This solutionist framing reduces structural and deeply rooted issues to isolated problems fixable through fragmented, quick and punctual interventions (i.e. innovations), rather than through systemic change. We see this particularly in climate discussions, where the emphasis on climate innovations – even Indigenous or peasant-led ones – risks acting as an irresponsible distraction, pushing discussions away from much needed radical climate action. This fragmented approach perpetuates the status quo and risks individualizing transformation by putting the responsibility of change on individuals or few communities. This framing also assumes that what exists today is unable to address our problems, thereby sidelining and erasing past and present actions, processes and ideas. This leads us to privilege external investment and externally driven ideas that are not grounded nor embodied in local realities. It encourages us to search outward, rather than recognize and build upon what we have.
We want to recognize what we already have, what doesn’t work and what works. We want systemic transformation to address root causes. We want structural change to be guided by what we value, what we cherish, what we care for.
Misconception 2 – Technologies will be the solution
The second misconception is the belief that technologies (including digital ones) can solve food system challenges. Even when we insist that innovations extend beyond the technological, we continue to support the idea that technologies in themselves can be innovations capable of addressing societal problems.
We have allowed a variety of technologies and practices to fall under the label of innovation, even when they arise from and are shaped by different historical and current economic, political and social contexts and processes, and wrought by structural hierarchies. Innovations now include everything from digital technologies to social practices such as community-supported agriculture or participatory guarantee systems. By grouping them together, we have inadvertently entered an innovation arena structured by economic and scientific rules and hierarchies that have and continue to serve an industrial agricultural model. Ultimately, this risks reducing our ability to challenge the problematic hierarchies underpinning the realm of science, technology and innovation, and even risks legitimizing them, including those privileging scientific positivist knowledge over other knowledge systems and prioritize market-driven logics.
We want to redirect discussions away from technologies, and towards politics where plural values, perspectives and knowledge are politically negotiated. We want to reclaim the right to refuse exploitative technologies and false solution narratives. We want to be able to practice refusal as radical care.[13]
Misconception 3 – Reproductive work does not count
The third misconception is that what is not considered “innovative” has little value for societal change.
Narratives that seek to reclaim innovation tend to focus on productive relations, while excluding reproductive ones. They disregard the power and role of reproductive work in societal transformation, and the need to reconfigure productive and reproductive relations: giving birth, feeding people or taking care of them will never be considered an innovation. By privileging innovation practices over other ones, we risk reinforcing productivist visions that not only fail to heal the metabolic rift, but also rely on the large-scale exploitation of the reproductive labour of gendered, racialized, and colonized people.[14] We also thereby depreciate or render invisible our social change processes and alternatives.
We want to rethink economics based on the logic of degrowth, to inherit and reimagine economics that exist outside capitalism, colonialism, racism and patriarchy. We want to holistically integrate productive labor with the reproductive labor of care of both women and of nature through an economics of care.[15]
Misconception 4 – We should not slow down
The fourth misconception is that we must constantly exert our societies and ourselves. By embracing innovations, we value constant linear improvement – some type of progress – and indirectly frame stagnation and preservation as antonyms of innovation, and laggards of innovators. Yet, wanting to continuously improve and reinvent ourselves, our practices, or society is not self-evident, natural, or universal. This obsession with improvement belongs to a modernist worldview that equates speed and newness with good, and slowness, hesitation and traditional with archaic and bad.
When we ask for traditional, peasant and Indigenous practices and knowledges to be recognized as innovative, we unwittingly accept this logic even if we do so to push against being cast as backwards. We actively engage with the modern and traditional dichotomy, and reproduce the assumption that entire knowledge systems could theoretically be non-innovative, irrelevant. We reduce complex knowledge systems to mere innovations and risk instrumentalizing them in political and scientific spaces. This prevents us from recognizing and supporting these systems with much greater deserved dignity, humility, and care.
The innovations narrative also makes us disregard practices that foster alternative visions of time and encourage us to slow down, all of which are promising strategies to resist exploitative societies and pave the way for transformation.
We want to slow down and embrace complexity. We want to hold and practice both preservation and change, and nurture ways of knowing and being that underpin people’s livelihoods.
Misconception 5 – Social change will be comfortable
The fifth misconception is that societal and individual transformation can be a comfortable and frictionless process. By framing ‘real’ innovations as inherently positive and constant drivers of some type of progress, we place change in a distant imagined future and in the hands of innovators. This framing subtly suggests that innovators (whether individuals or communities) and their future innovations can spare us the messy and difficult embodied collective political work. It displaces the urgency of political action from the present to an imagined future, and its weight from societies to a few people.
By casting the future as the primary site of change, the innovation narrative obscures the present and bodies as political struggles during and through which power is shaped, contested, and negotiated. This narrative feeds into today’s great promise to reduce, or completely avoid, frictions and alterity.[16] It advances dematerialized and disembodied visions of linear transitions, rather than embodied and transformative ones.
We want to recenter the present and re-anchor materialities and bodies in all their contradictions in the present and in our movements’ struggles. We want to recenter bodies, relations, dependencies, failures, discomfort and lived experiences in political change.
Misconception 6 – No need to fix injustices
Finally, the last misconception is that we do not need to decolonize, dismantle patriarchy, address racism and redistribute. Innovation narratives suppose we can create a new future from scratch, and when one innovation fails, another will fix it. It leads us to a ‘fuite en avant’, to try to avoid something that is difficult and burdensome, to run away from one’s responsibilities and the past. But present crises are results of past failures and acts of violence, exploitation and oppression — from colonialism to the Green Revolution. The problems we are sitting with demand that we face the past rather than renew ourselves, and center justice rather than progress or advancement.
The dominant framing of innovation assumes we can innovate ourselves out of oppressive structures. For instance, it continues to make us think we can empower women within patriarchy and capitalism. Some of our efforts to reclaim innovations question the “empowering women” narrative but we have failed to articulate a strong feminist critique and alternative. We need more than pushing more women into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) or addressing gender stereotypes.
We want to contemplate uncomfortable truths, sit with them and work through them. We want to repair and redistribute. We want meaningful links between pasts, presents and futures, with our bodies and struggles at the center. We want to build on existing processes, histories and lived experiences in our territories, not something that erases. We want feminist, decolonial and just futures.
Refusing innovation to open new possibilities (5)
Innovation narratives neither fit our need for radical change, nor align with the paradigms of food sovereignty and agroecology. Efforts to demystify, unpack and reorient innovation face insurmountable barriers, for the aspirations that underpin the innovation imperative are deeply rooted in modern, colonial, patriarchal and capitalist logics that cannot be fully transplanted to a fairer system.
To truly reclaim innovation would entail returning to its original notion of political resistance and disruption. But the contemporary innovation narrative only makes sense within a capitalist and modern paradigm. Outside of it, the notion loses its meaning. For this reason, the agroecology and food sovereignty movements might well consider innovation, in all its inflections, as bullshit.
We invite our movements to refuse innovation.
Refusing innovation can help us politicize food sovereignty, agroecology and food system transformation in policy and practice.
Refusing innovation can give us the tools to develop better analysis and proposals around the technologies we want to support and those we want to reject, those we want to tinker with and why, and how to govern them.
Refusing innovation can help pluralize futures. It can redirect bodies, time and energies towards working with and through power for radical change.
Refusing innovation can help us explore alternative stories of societal change that we aspire to.
Stories that value deep and relational practices, knowledge, and social practices without having to label and market them as ‘innovations’ merely for acknowledgment, legitimacy and funding.
Stories of transformation that demand we reshape entire social, political and economic systems.
Stories of collective making and unmaking of what labour, work, care, knowledge and a good life mean.
Stories of solidarity, courage, humility, doubt, and responsibility, of facing violent histories and past failures, and engaging in the difficult ongoing work of decolonization and dismantling patriarchy.
This can only work if we create the political, legal and material conditions in which peasants, grassroots communities, Indigenous Peoples and all of us have space and autonomy to truly maintain, foster, develop and share practices and tools (including technological ones) that respond to our different needs, life views and aspirations, without imperiling the ways of being and existence of others and our co-existence with nature. Refusing innovation and building autonomy must go hand in hand.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Matt Canfield, Barbara Van Dyck and Colin Anderson for their very useful comments and encouragements. The views expressed in this article are ours.
[*] By bullshit, we refer to the emptiness, lack of real substance, and disconnection from reality that characterise the term innovation, and to the way it nonetheless acts as a dominant value in our society. We use the term in reference to the philosophical sense introduced by Harry Frankfurt, extended through David Graeber’s work on “bullshit jobs,” and increasingly used in academic debates about AI as “bullshit.”
[1] We use this terminology from Anderson, C. R., & Maughan, C. (2021). “The innovation imperative”: the struggle over agroecology in the international food policy arena.
[2] See for instance: FAO. (2022). Introducing the Agrifood Systems Technologies and Innovations Outlook.; FAO. (2022). Transforming Food Systems: Pathways for Country-led Innovation; FAO. (2023). Harvesting Change: Harnessing emerging technologies and innovations for agrifood system transformation.
[3] See for instance SDG 9: Industry, innovation and infrastructure, and UNDP. (2025). Next Practices for a More Sustainable Future: SDG innovation agendas built by the UNDP Accelerator Labs and partners.
[4] See for instance: Data for Food Security and Nutrition: CSIPM Vision Statement.; Pan-African declaration on the future of biodigital technologies in food and agriculture.; Montenegro de Wit, M. (2022). Can agroecology and CRISPR mix? The politics of complementarity and moving toward technology sovereignty.; Ruder, S.-L., & Wittman, H. (2025). Agricultural data governance from the ground up: Exploring data justice with agri-food movements.
[5] UN Food System Summit: Innovation Lever of Change, Policy Brief (2021).
[6] The Draghi report: A competitiveness strategy for Europe (2024).
[7] See FAO. (2018). FAO’s Work on Agroecology: A pathway to achieving the SDGs; HLPE. (2019). Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition; IFAD. Agroecology.;UNDP. (2025). Supporting Food Systems Transformation Towards Sustainability and Resilience Background Briefing: Why agroecology is a cornerstone for food systems.
[8] Modernity is a worldview grounded in a pursuit of continuous improvement – progress – within a linear conception of time, and predicated on the belief in an absolute truth attainable through reason. Driven by human rationality (embodied in Western Science and opposed to emotions), economic growth and technological development, modernity entails elevating (some) humans above nature, rejecting religion or spirituality, building nation-states, industrializing societies, and developing capitalism. Critics of modernity have underscored that its very existence depends on colonialism and the large-scale exploitation of people and the environment. Given this inseparability, some have suggested calling this ideal and historical process colonial modernity. Others have also highlighted modernity’s reliance on patriarchal structures, and the ways in which it reshapes and reinforces them. See for instance: Arora, S., & Stirling, A. (2023). Colonial modernity and sustainability transitions: A conceptualisation in six dimensions; Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future imperfect: Science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity; Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System; Quijano, A. (2007). COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY.
[9] See for instance: FAO. (2024). The role of innovation and digitalization in the sustainable use of natural resources to accelerate the implementation of climate-resilient and low-emission pathways in agrifood systems; Kovacic, Z et al. (2024). The twin green and digital transition: High-level policy or science fiction?.
[10] Irani, L. (2019). Chasing innovation: Making entrepreneurial citizens in modern India.
[11] See for instance ECVC. (2022). Future Technologies and Food Sovereignty; Ensor, J. & de Bruin, A. (2022). The role of learning in farmer-led innovation; Fairbairn, M. et al. (2025).Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots; Friends of the Earth International. (2019). Real innovation from and for the people; Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology; Rose, D. C., & Chilvers, J. (2018). Agriculture 4.0: Broadening responsible innovation in an era of smart farming.
[12] For instance, the Responsible Research Innovation framework, and more recently uptake of principles for digital technology development and data justice. See for example: CSIPM. (2023). Data for Food Security and Nutrition: CSIPM Vision Statement; Eastwood, C. et al. (2019). Managing Socio-Ethical Challenges in the Development of Smart Farming: From a Fragmented to a Comprehensive Approach for Responsible Research and Innovation; Ruder, S.-L., & Wittman, H. (2025). Agricultural data governance from the ground up: Exploring data justice with agri-food movements.
[13] Arora, S., Van Dyck, B. (2021). Refusal as Radical Care? Moving Beyond Modern Industrial Agriculture.
[14] Barca, S. (2020). Forces of reproduction: Notes for a counter-hegemonic Anthropocene.
[15] Pimbert, M. & Claeys, P. (2024). Food Sovereignty.
[16] See for instance Naomi Klein. (2023). Doppelganger.