Image credit: Lachlan Turczan / Google, “Making the Invisible Visible,” Milan Design Week 2025.

The Invisible Return: A spillover pathway for EU agricultural research investment

A reflection on evaluation frameworks, spillover effects, and what infrastructure economics might teach us about Horizon tools

Horizon Europe represents one of the most substantial public commitments to agricultural research and innovation in the world, funding multi-actor projects, thematic networks, living labs, and knowledge exchange platforms designed to accelerate the transition to more sustainable, productive, and resilient farming systems. Yet as each programme cycle matures, a familiar challenge tends to re-emerge: how do we demonstrate that this investment actually works?

This article draws on ideas from infrastructure economics to reflect on why the challenge remains, suggesting that the issue may lie not in the absence of impact, but perhaps in where and how we choose to look for it.

What We Measure, and What We Miss

Current evaluation practice in EU agricultural research tends to focus on what programmes produce: scientific publications, technology prototypes, farmer training events, practice-ready guidelines, policy briefs, and social media outreach. These outputs are visible, countable, and reportable. They satisfy audit requirements and feed neatly into monitoring dashboards. But they tell us surprisingly little about whether research investment actually changes what happens on the ground.

The gap between outputs and outcomes is well recognised in the impact assessment literature. Weiβhuhn et al. (2018) reviewed decades of research impact assessment in agriculture and found that evaluations are systematically skewed toward economic and bibliometric indicators, with environmental and behavioural impacts left substantially underassessed despite being arguably the most policy-relevant outcomes in the current Horizon Europe context. More recently, Faure et al. (2024) tested a multi-dimensional societal impact framework across three agricultural research case studies and found that frameworks assuming simple cause-and-effect attribution consistently underperform compared to approaches grounded in contribution logic and systems thinking. In the Horizon agriculture context, a recent EU CAP Network study covering nearly 1,000 Operational Group projects found that while knowledge co-creation was broadly positive, tracing the pathway from project outputs to farm-level behaviour change remained methodologically elusive (EU CAP Network, 2024). This is not a criticism of the projects themselves; it is a reflection of the evaluative tools available to assess them.

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