China’s sustainable development goals and carbon neutrality targets cannot be achieved without revolutionary transitions of the agricultural sector. The rapid development of digital technologies is believed to play a huge role in this revolution. The ongoing prevention and control of COVID-19 has greatly boosted the penetration of digital technology services in all areas of society, and sustainable transformation driven by digital technologies and services is rapidly becoming an area of innovation and research. Studies have shown that the rapid advancement of digitalization is also accompanied by a series of new governance challenges and problems: (1) unclear strategic orientation and inadequate policy and regulatory responses; (2) various stakeholders have not formed a sustainable community of interest; (3) information explosion is accompanied by information fragmentation and digital divide between countries and populations within countries. Meanwhile, current research has focused more on the role of digital services in urban governance and industrial development and lacks systematic research on its role in sustainable agricultural and rural development. To address the realities faced by different stakeholders in the process of digital transformation of agriculture, this paper aims to propose an inclusive analytical framework based on the meta-governance theory to identify and analyze the demand, supply, actor networks, and incentives in the digital technology-and-services-driven sustainable agricultural transformation, starting from the goals and connotations of sustainable agricultural and rural transformation and the interactions among different stakeholders in governing information flows. This analytical framework is further applied to analyze the cases of China and the EU. Although China and the EU represent different development phases and policy contexts, the framework is valid for capturing the characteristics of information flows and actor networks along the flows. It is concluded that a common information platform based on the stakeholder network would benefit all stakeholders, help reach common framing of issues, and maintain a dynamic exchange of information. Depending on the country context, different types of stakeholders may play different roles in creating, supervising, and maintaining such platforms. Digital infrastructures/products as hardware and farmers digital capacity as ‘software’ are the two wings for digital sustainable transformation. Innovative incentives from different countries may inspire each other. In any case, farmers’ actual farming behavior changes should be an important criterion for evaluating the effects and effectiveness of digital transition governance.

Based on the logistic growth model, the relationship between technology innovation and the evolution of economic forms was analyzed, and the main characteristics and basic laws of the five economic forms of hunter–gatherer, agriculture, industry, information, and bioeconomy were summarized. Based on a comprehensive and intensive scan of the latest bioeconomy development strategies of various countries, we summarized their two main driving forces from the technological supply side and economic and social demand side, as well as their four distinctive features, namely the comprehensiveness of science and technology innovation, the aggregation of industrial development, the globalization of development goals, and strong policy dependence. Finally, we proposed countermeasures to design the implementation path of the bioeconomy and improve the quality of the bioeconomy factor supply in terms of the development and application of biotechnology, the upgradation of bioindustry clusters, the positive policy environment, and the theorization of the bioeconomy.

Technology is an instrument to build BRI relationships, mitigate the environmental and climate impacts of BRI projects, as well as to enhance environmental sustainability in the regions. This study aims to reposition China in global climate technology transfer in BRI era and to obtain initial knowledge on needs, priorities, and barriers from the receivers’ perspective. Focus group method with aid of questionnaire survey and follow-up face-to-face interviews was adopted to capture the major issues directly expressed by receivers from these countries. A total of 63 valid questionnaires were collected, and 13 respondents were face-to-face interviewed. The results confirmed that energy and agriculture were the most prioritized sectors for mitigation and adaptation in the developing countries alongside OBOR. The prioritized technologies for mitigation included cogeneration, solar photovoltaic, and biomass/biogas electricity. Irrigation, conservation agriculture, and soil management were prioritized for adaptation in agricultural sector, and water recycling and reuse, source water protection, and urban drainage management in water resource sector. Technology cost during installation and operation was stressed as the most important factor constraining the application and diffusion of climate technologies. But communication including language, information, and ways of communication, was also identified as an important factor. This implied that the conventional climate technology transfer need adapt to changing contexts of BRI and be complemented with innovative approaches involving multi-actors in different phases of climate technology development. Due to the limited representativeness of the sample, the results can hardly be generalized to all the countries, but raised interesting topics for future researches.