Theory of Change: Mechanism Maps of Agricultural Innovations in Rural Scotland

This submission constitutes Milestone 4.2.2 of Activity 4.2, “Ex-ante assessment of the impact of novel crops and farming techniques on rural territories,” of the project “JHI-B1-3 – The impact of novel crops and farming practices on the Scottish agricultural landscape,” funded by the Strategic Research Programme (2022–2027) of the Scottish Government’s Rural & Environmental Science & Analytical Services (RESAS) Division. Activity 4.2 investigates the potential impact of agricultural innovation on local food systems in rural Scotland. The Orkney Islands were chosen as the case study; vertical farming and aeroponic Tower Farms® to be installed in Polycrubs® were selected as the innovations of interest, to be treated as place-based interventions. This milestone, in particular, presents Theories of Change (ToC) and Mechanism Maps (MMs) developed for each innovation by the research team based on interviews with local stakeholders and a workshop conducted in September 2025. The ToC MM approach builds on the methodology illustrated in Piras et al. (2022), which in turn is based on the Horizon 2020 project RELOCAL. For each intervention, after identifying the long-term goal, we break it down into constituent actions, define the causal pathways triggered by these actions, identify the baseline assumptions underpinning the intermediate outcomes, and examine how the causal pathways, and thus the possibility to achieve the long-term goal, are affected by external conditions. These ToC MMs will be used to develop likely scenarios for deploying the innovations together with local stakeholders.