Service Innovation Trajectories and Institutionnal Inertia : Agricultural Extension in Three European Countries[Trajectoires d’innovation des services et inertie institutionnelle : dynamique du conseil dans trois agricultures européennes]

This article deals with the dynamics of agricultural extension in three countries: France, Netherlands, and new German Länder, for the period between 1945 and 2005. Agricultural extension can be described as a service activity, which provides intangible resources to produce knowledge with and for the farmers. By combining evolutionist and regulationist theories, a change could be observed in the relations between the dynamic of innovation within services and the distribution of intangible resources among farmers through agricultural extension institutions. During post second world war decades, there was a virtuous relation between innovation aimed at producing standardised knowledge for agricultural extension, and a distribution of extension for a selective basis of farms. Since the 1990ies, this virtuous relation does not exist anymore. Even though there is a potential for an enlargement of the proportion of farms which could benefit from technical extension thanks to new configuration of innovation within extension, institutional inertia seems to prevent from this enlargement, although farm diversity could play a key role to enable agriculture to contribute to sustainable development.