From understanding seed systems to changing them: Gareth Borman on his PhD
In June 2025, SeedNL colleague Gareth Borman successfully defended his PhD thesis, Seed change: Stewarding seed systems transformation, at Wageningen University. The research grew out of years of work with seed sector partnerships in Ethiopia and elsewhere. Rather than asking only how seed systems work, Gareth asks what people trying to change them actually do, and when their efforts can contribute to deeper and more lasting change.
That is not a small question. Seed systems bring together people with different interests and different ideas about what improvement should look like. We spoke with Gareth about the long road of his PhD, the findings that stayed with him and what they might mean for SeedNL and its partners.
“Knowing how systems change is not the same as knowing how to change them”
In a nutshell, what is your PhD about?
At the centre of the thesis are change agents: people who try to make change happen in the seed sector. I wanted to understand which of their practices can be transformative. By that, I mean practices that do more than improve one activity or make a single project succeed. In academia, the term transformation refers to a fundamental change in how a system works, not just how well it works, including shifts in the rules and relationships among its actors.
I was not trying to produce another theory of change, where one activity is expected to lead to the next result. I was looking for something closer to a theory of practice: what do people actually do when they try to change a complex system, and why do some of those practices matter? The term praxis is used in the thesis, which means bringing thought and action together, learning from practice and using that learning to act more effectively.
The thesis looks at three broad practices of change agents: Piloting, Facilitating, and Framing. Piloting is about demonstrating something new and creating room to test it. Facilitating is about building the relationships and support that allow an innovation to move beyond the pilot and become part of how the system works. Framing is about explaining the problem and the purpose of change in a way that resonates with policymakers, industry leaders or the advisers around them.
These practices happen at different levels. A small experiment can show that another way of working is possible, but that is rarely enough on its own. The rules and relationships around it also have to move. My thesis uses systems theory to explain why those levels need to connect.
What made you want to research this topic, and why is it important?
It arrived partly through serendipity. For a while, I explored three or four possible PhD topics. I already had a couple of papers and was working on a third, and needed to find the red thread connecting them. That pushed me to zoom out. Transformation and change agency became the lenses through which the different pieces started to come together.
At the same time, this was not an absurd topic for me to explore. It was already part of our narrative at Wageningen University & Research, where I worked at the time, and in the objectives of Integrated Seed Sector Development partnerships. We had ambitious ideas about meaningful, deep and lasting change, and already had an intuition to work at multiple levels of seed systems to achieve such change. Connecting people and creating the conditions for change were already part of our praxis.
The PhD became a way of reflecting on what we had been doing with many partners, then examining it more critically. That made the topic intuitive to me. I was studying a practice I knew from the inside.
What was the process of doing and eventually writing the PhD like?
My first instinct is to say chaotic, but that is not quite fair. It was a search. I spent a long time swimming in the material, trying to understand what interested me and how to connect it to social science.
I did not come from a social science background. There were periods when I was learning the language and methods of the field while also trying to ask relevant research questions. I was derailed more than once. At times, the destination was there, but it was difficult to keep a fixed point on the horizon.
What changed was gaining traction. I published a couple of papers, worked with collaborators who brought energy to the academic side, and started to see the frame that connected the different experiences. Then the tires hit the track. After years of swimming, the final part moved surprisingly quickly.
What are the findings that matter most to you?
That is always the hardest question. One conclusion is that we need to move away from the simple divide between formal and informal seed systems. The same goes for other binaries: certified or not, public or private, commercial or social. In reality, seed systems are plural. Different crops and markets depend on different combinations of actors and ways of producing, exchanging or regulating seed. Even what we call the formal sector contains very different arrangements - local entrepreneurial, national public-private, international public and international private are all formal seed systems, but operate on very different footing and target different segments. Treating them as one system hides differences that matter for policy and investment.
Another insight from the thesis is that knowing how systems change is not the same as knowing how to change them. We can analyse a system in great detail and still not know how to act within it. That led me to stewardship.
Stewardship is not the aspiration to control cause and effect. It is more about understanding how to create the conditions that enable desirable change to occur and facilitating that as a practice. It involves holding the bigger picture, caring about the direction of change and helping a wider group of actors work towards more desirable outcomes. It’s also not an individual effort. In the thesis I describe stewardship as a diffuse performance, not simply a job title.
The strand I learned most from personally was power. My favourite paper in the PhD examined the strategies used by partnership facilitators in regional seed groups in Ethiopia. It showed that exercising power is not only about having, for example, money or formal authority. Mobilising the power of others is important too and ideas can be a source of power. The way a problem is framed can change what people see as possible. Personal relationships can be used to build coalitions and reach agreement with great efficiency.
That matters for practitioners. Many of us exercise this kind of influence without calling it power. We decide who enters the room, which evidence becomes visible and how a shared problem is described.
“Can we afford to continue to approach cooperation from the perspective that partners only need to adapt to us? Or do we also have to adapt to a new order?”
What do your findings mean in practice for SeedNL and its partners?
In the thesis, I recommend embedding stewardship institutionally. I suggested that knowledge institutions might be a natural home because they can combine research with a broad view across the sector. I still believe stewardship matters, but I am less certain that it should sit in one institution.
Change at this level is a team effort. We cannot wait for a single visionary champion to appear. Stewardship can be distributed among people who share a direction and have enough room to connect their work. It also has to be transdisciplinary - not only should academics work between different disciplines, they need to involve practitioners and citizens as well.
I see clear parallels with SeedNL. We are brought together by partners that do not share the exact same interests or resources. SeedNL is not fully independent of those interests - that is part of the reality of the role - but it occupies a position where different parts of the sector can meet around a broader goal: farmers’ access to quality seed. It also extends that conversation to partners working in very different country contexts. In that sense, SeedNL performs part of a stewarding role.
That role becomes important when we discuss aid and trade. Vegetables and potatoes can create clear commercial entry points, and business can bring valuable solutions. Yet not every desired outcome can be privatised. Some public outcomes, especially for groups that are less commercially attractive, need other forms of investment. So the practical question is: what are we trying to achieve here, and which actors and resources fit that purpose?
The same applies to reciprocal partnerships. Reciprocity does not mean every exchange must be of equal value at every moment. It means both sides should see the benefit. In one partnership, Dutch companies may bring seed and market connections. In another, the most useful contribution may be knowledge about how a sector is regulated and coordinated. We should ask partners what is valuable to them rather than assume that our preferred offer is their answer.
The work on power also becomes very practical. How do we get a government’s attention? Which alliance gives an issue more weight? How do we make a hidden bottleneck visible? Where should limited resources go if we want a breakthrough rather than another activity? Those are everyday programme choices, and they shape what change becomes possible.
What message would you like SeedNL stakeholders to take away from your research?
Seed is a strong area of Dutch expertise, and it gives the Netherlands a legitimate contribution to make in development cooperation. The risk is assuming that everyone will automatically share our view of what good seed sector development looks like.
Partner countries have choices. We have created a system where partners have to be part of our institutions to benefit from solutions; UPOV, ISTA, OECD Seed Schemes. But with the rise of new powers, there is not only competition for partnerships, markets and solutions but different values to the ones we uphold as well. In that setting, can we afford to continue to approach cooperation from the perspective that partners only need to adapt to us? Or do we also have to adapt to a new order?
This brings me back to the binaries or false dichotomies in my thesis. We should be cautious to treat seed as quality seed only if it follows one particular model. Reality will always be more complex than that.
That does not mean abandoning quality or standards for how we do things. It means being open to adaptations, listening to context and accepting that partnership involves compromise.
