This article explores the relation between innovation and resources that are governed as commons by looking at the governance of potato genetic resources, especially in the context of the emergence ofhybrid diploid potato breedingthat will enable potato propagation through true seeds. As a new breeding tool, hybrid diploid potato breeding may not only revolutionize traditional potato breeding practices, it may also strongly affect current governance modes of potato genetic resources as a commons. Contrary to conventional accounts of the commons that treat technological innovation mainly as an exogenous factor, we argue that technological innovation can better be understood as an endogenous factor. In particular, we develop aco-production frameworkof innovation and the commons that draws attention to the different ways in which innovation, commons and its governance interact. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the constitution of potato genetic resources as a commons cannot be understood without considering the various ways in which technological innovation affects resources and mediate how these are governed. While reversely, technological innovations themselves are also enabled and constrained by users who govern potato genetic resources as a shared resource. We argue that changes in the governance of genetic resources can be understood as a change from one socio-technical constellation to another, whereby innovations, resources, and institutions are continuously co-produced.

The discussion about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on Africa is deeply divided and contains widely diverging claims about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. Building upon literature on the ‘good farmer’ that highlights that farmers identities are an important factor in explaining the success or failure of agricultural change, we argue that the identity of the farmer is an undervalued yet crucial aspect for understanding the debate about the impact of agricultural biotechnology on African farmers. In this article we therefore investigate what farmers’ identities are implicated in the arguments about the impact of biotechnology on African farmers. We aim to identify the main fault lines in different accounts of the African biotechnology farmer by analysing the identities ascribed to them in two prominent cases of controversy: the debates at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the discussion about the impact of biotechnology on smallholder farmers in the Makhathini flats in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Our findings demonstrate that arguments about biotechnology are informed by diverging conceptions of who the African farmer is, what is important for the African farmer, and what role the African farmer has in relation to agricultural biotechnology. These findings remain relevant for current discussions on gene editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas. Openly discussing these different views on the identity of smallholder farmers is crucial for moving forward in the biotechnology controversy and can inform future attempts to elicit the farmer’s voice.

Gene editing technologies like CRISPR/Cas are breathing new life into expectations about the benefits of genetically modified crops for smallholder farmers in the global South. In this article, we put these expectations to the test. We have interrogated both whether crop gene editing is employed for smallholder farmers and how this is done in ways that are more or less inclusive. To this end, we systematically investigated projects using gene editing for smallholder farmers and analyzed their activities using the framework of inclusive innovation. We have 3 main findings. First, gene editing indeed can be used to target crops and traits that may benefit smallholder farmers. We found 30 projects that target a variety of crops and traits for smallholders. Second, the use of gene editing for smallholder farmers is emerging slowly at best. The number of projects is relatively small, the set of crops that is targeted is relatively limited, and the number of countries that engage in these activities is small. And third, we found 2 distinct approaches to inclusive innovation that we describe as spacecraft approach and helicopter approach to inclusive innovation. We argue that the inclusive innovation framework should not be used as a checkbox—where inclusion is achieved if all types of inclusion are covered—but instead should be used as a tool for rendering visible the choices that have been made in inclusion, thus opening up such choices for critical scrutiny.