The living labs (LLs) approach has been applied around the globe to generate innovation within and suited to real-life problems and contexts. Despite the promise of the LL approach for addressing complex challenges like socio-ecological change, there is a gap in practitioner and academic community knowledge surrounding how to measure and evaluate both the performance of a given LL process and its wider impacts. Notably, this gap appears particularly acute in LLs designed to address environmental or agricultural sustainability. This article seeks to verify and address this knowledge gap by conducting an adopted scoping review method which uses a combination of tools for text mining alongside human text analysis. In total, 138 academic articles were screened, out of which 88 articles were read in full and 41 articles were found relevant for this study. The findings reveal limited studies putting forward generalizable approaches or frameworks for evaluating the impact of LLs and even fewer in the agricultural or sustainability sector. The dominant method for evaluation used in the literature is comparative qualitative case studies. This research uncovers a potential tension regarding LL work: the specificity of LL studies works against the development of evaluation indicators and a universal framework to guide the impact assessment of LLs across jurisdictions and studies in order to move toward generalizability.

This paper argues that existing food security and food sovereignty approaches are inadequate to fully understand contradictory human development, nutrition, and productivity trends in Nepalese small-scale agriculture. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we developed a new food wellbeing approach that combines insights from food security, food sovereignty, and social wellbeing perspectives. We used the approach to frame 65 semi-structured interviews in a cluster of villages in Kaski district in the mid-hills of Nepal on various aspects of food security, agriculture, off-farm livelihood opportunities, and women’s wellbeing. Our results indicate that context-specific subjective and social relational factors highlighted by the food wellbeing approach are key to understanding a paradox of increased food security, yet decreasing sustainability of small-scale agriculture. Increased levels of male out-migration and opportunities for local off-farm work have increased local capacity to purchase food. The positive consequences for food security are indicated by evidence that households with non-farm income sources had better food sufficiency, absorption capacity, nutritional quality, and stability of food supply. These off-farm employment opportunities have also led to the greater involvement of low caste groups and women in small-scale agriculture. This has been empowering for both groups and led to an increase in wellbeing, particularly for those women who have become de facto heads of household. Yet, small landholdings, persistent patterns of unequal and absentee land ownership, sharecropping, women’s overwork, and the aspirations of low caste farmers and women away from agriculture are simultaneously driving the erosion of local small-scale agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability.

Agricultural mechanization in developing countries has taken at least two contested innovation pathways—the “incumbent trajectory” that promotes industrial agriculture, and an “alternative pathway” that supports small-scale mechanization for sustainable development of hillside farming systems. Although both pathways can potentially reduce human and animal drudgery, the body of literature that assesses the sustainability impacts of these mechanization pathways in the local ecological, socio-economic, cultural, and historical contexts of hillside farms is either nonexistent or under-theorized. This paper addresses this missing literature by examining the case of Nepal’s first Agricultural Mechanization Promotion Policy 2014 (AMPP) using a conceptual framework of what will be defined as “responsible innovation”. The historical context of this assessment involves the incumbent trajectory of mechanization in the country since the late 1960s that neglected smallholder farms located in the hills and mountains and biased mechanization policy for flat areas only. Findings from this study suggest that the AMPP addressed issues for smallholder production, including gender inequality, exclusion of smallholder farmers, and biophysical challenges associated with hillside farming systems, but it remains unclear whether and how the policy promotes small-scale agricultural mechanization for sustainable development of agriculture in the hills and mountains of Nepal.

A clear consensus has emerged that innovations are important for adapting to drought and overcoming other biophysical limitations in smallholder farming systems; however, women are notably marginalized from agricultural innovations. We examine whether and how gendered roles and responsibilities shape the adoption and usage of improved wheat varieties and simultaneously uncover opportunities to address and lessen gender-based differences in agricultural innovations. The field data were collected using snowball sampling from seven communities (three in Morocco and four in Uzbekistan) among 574 farmers (half men and half women) of different generations, genders, social statuses, and social classes. Our findings demonstrate how the complex interactions of biophysical constraints, intra-household (spousal and kinship) relations, and the broader macro-level political economy of agriculture converge to influence different identities of women and men farmers' wheat production and processing practices. We argue that without focusing on the socio-cultural factors affecting agriculture, new seed varieties alone cannot address the multifaceted problems confronting farmers in all parts of the world.

This paper examines how rural transformation in Uzbekistan alters gender norms and roles and, consequently, affects women's involvement in agriculture. We focus on the role that contextual factors, particularly kinship relations, government goals, and institutional structures each contribute to rural transformation and male out-migration, and how these, in turn, increase women's work in wheat production and processing. The wheat is the most important crop in the country which has the highest area coverage (35%) in Uzbekistan. We begin by highlighting the post-Soviet transition in Uzbekistan and its effects on the agricultural sector, including how households respond to opportunities for innovation. We then move to a discussion of our methodological approach drawing on insights from the GENNOVATE project, a collaborative initiative across 11 CGIAR centres that explored the relationship between changing gender norms in relation to women's roles in agricultural production and processing. Next, we examine an understudied topic in migration research i.e., how the transformation of agriculture contributes to increased dependence on unpaid female agricultural labour. We conclude with an analysis of how the feminization of agriculture alters household relations and women's participation in the public sphere. Significantly, we close with a reflection on what these changes mean for gender and innovation studies.