This paper addresses the question how public-private partnerships function as systemic innovation policy instruments within agricultural innovation systems. Public-private partnerships are a popular government tool to promote innovations. However, the wide ranging nature of PPPs make it difficult to assess their effects beyond the direct impacts they generate for the partners. This paper broadens the discussion on the evaluation of PPPs beyond the organisational and financial benefits of the actors involved, and assesses their contribution to the functioning of the innovation system itself. In this paper, we utilise an innovation system perspective that focusses on how PPPs influence the dynamic interplay of innovation system functions and how these functions form a set of feedback loops that constitute an ‘innovation motor’. We compare the innovation history of four cases that differ in their strategic policy goals, either working on agricultural sustainability, or on the international competitiveness in the Dutch agricultural sector. The results show the strengths and weaknesses of different types of public-private partnerships as systemic instruments and their capability to orchestrate other types of innovation policy instruments.

本文提出了一个问题，即公私伙伴关系如何在农业创新系统中作为系统创新政策工具发挥作用。公私合作伙伴关系是政府促进创新的流行工具。但是，PPP的广泛性使其难以评估其对合作伙伴产生的直接影响之外的影响。本文扩大了对PPP评估的讨论范围，超出了相关参与者的组织和财务利益，并评估了它们对创新系统自身功能的贡献。在本文中，我们利用创新系统的观点，重点关注PPP如何影响创新系统功能的动态相互作用以及这些功能如何形成构成“创新马达”的一组反馈回路。我们比较了四个案例的创新历史，这些案例的战略政策目标各不相同，要么致力于农业可持续发展，要么致力于荷兰农业部门的国际竞争力。结果表明，不同类型的公私伙伴关系作为系统性工具的优缺点，以及它们协调其他类型的创新政策工具的能力。