Deliberative project design for understanding and working within complexity in agricultural systems

New innovations have the potential to improve agricultural resilience, profitability, sustainability and regenerative potential. However, new technologies and approaches emerge in a complex sociocultural context, with farmer decisions based on a range of interacting social, economic and environmental factors. Traditional approaches to research and development within agri-food systems often assume continuity and/or linearity in change processes, which is rarely the case in practice. There are calls for approaches and methods to research and development that can apply deliberative and participatory processes to enable social learning and innovation while embracing inherent complexities. Through a reflection process relating to two multi-stakeholder, collaborative, soils-focused agri-food research projects in Australia, this paper explores how agricultural research projects can navigate and work with complexity. The first project is a national Rural Landholder Social Benchmarking Study, aimed at collecting and drawing together complex data on farmer decision-making around adoption of innovations; and the second is a Knowledge-Sharing Project aimed at improving farmer engagement in new technologies and innovation across Australian farming regions. Our reflective analysis, based on exploring how complexity principles are enacted in these two projects, illustrates how projects can be developed along self-organising principles, developing team capacity to continually learn together and respond to the unexpected. Considering the complex elements of these projects, and how they have operated, opens a pathway for deliberative design that embraces complexity, which may assist the agricultural sector in the development of future research and project management.