Digital Sustainability: Green Transformation of the Agri-Food Industry

Climate crises confirm that sustaining a global system of extractive practices that do irreversible harm to planetary health is untenable. Restoring and replenishing ecological balance requires green transformation: fundamental reconfiguration of how industries operate through countless distinctive changes, taking place across levels, at the same time. In response to these challenges, this dissertation advances a multi-level perspective of digital sustainability–the development and deployment of digital resources for sustainable practices that improve the environment, society, and economic welfare. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork (2020–2024), including 67 interviews with diverse agri-food stakeholders, the dissertation shows how digital sustainability can facilitate a shift in the agri-food industry from extractive practices to regenerative outcomes.
To advance these insights, the dissertation draws on five linked field studies that constitute its empirical and conceptual foundation. Through in-depth empirical examination of how plant-based product development leverages artificial intelligence (AI), Study A shows that digital sustainability emerges in distinct niches to innovate green, “planternative” practices. Study B then shows how such niche-level efforts that leverage digital resources for green transformation can piggyback on ongoing digital transformation efforts to accelerate sustainability outcomes. Studies C and D show that, before niche innovations can scale and reconfigure prevailing industry regimes and before ecosystemic collaboration can be achieved, tensions related to organizational identity and barriers to interorganizational data sourcing must be overcome. In its turn, Study E demonstrates how industry-wide ecosystems provide three distinct pathways – for resource optimization, resource substitution, and resource redistribution – that anchor green practices in broad societal landscapes.
Together, the five studies advance insights into digital sustainability as a multi-level phenomenon by demonstrating that leveraging digital resources to transform extractive industry practices requires systemic coordination of actions across niches, regimes, and landscapes. These insights contribute to the information systems (IS) literature by showing that large-scale sustainability-related transformation necessitates ecosystemic collaboration beyond what a single enterprise can achieve. Thus, the multi-level perspective advanced in this dissertation opens the case for synthesizing previously fragmented bodies of literature and proposes an integrated explanation of ways in which systemic coordination in pursuit of digital sustainability can be achieved across different levels. For practitioners, the key insight that successful green transformation requires systemic coordination may encourage industry leaders and policymakers to nurture niche-level innovations and leverage ecosystemic collaboration. The dissertation can guide the identification of pathways for cultivating regenerative practices through coordination of other industries’ niche-regime landscapes to accelerate green transformation and restore planetary health.