Agriculture Innovation System (AIS) thinking and approaches are largely perceived as a sine-qua-non for the design and implementation of effective and sustainable agriculture development programmes. AIS has gained popularity in the agriculture innovation literature and has been embedded in policy documents of agriculture sector institutions in many countries. However, there is much less evidence of AIS thinking influencing the behaviours of research and extension institutions and staff ‘on the ground’.

The shift to industrial agriculture in Europe brought along a range of environmental and social externalities. This led policy makers, researchers and civil servants to consider and explore the potential of diversified farming systems (DFS) to address current problems in agriculture. However, because of multiple obstacles adoption of these DFS by farmers is not obvious. In this study we investigate the case of agroforestry (AF) systems in Flanders, where a government incentive scheme initiated in 2011, did not lead to the expected uptake of AF systems by farmers.