Geography Compass 9/5 (2015): 225–236, 10.1111/gec3.12212 Seeds, Agricultural Systems and Socio-natures: Towards an Actor–Network Theory Informed Political Ecology of Agriculture Natasha Watts 1 and Ivan R. Scales 2 * 1 Department of Geography, University of Cambridge 2 St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge Abstract Agriculture has recently been the subject of considerable research and policy attention. Events such as the 2008 ‘world food price crisis’ and concerns over the future of global food security have led to calls for a ‘New Green Revolution’, with an emphasis on boosting yields through new transgenic crop varieties. However, critics have raised concerns over the growing role of global agribusiness and transnational capital in agriculture, as well as the potential social and ecological impacts of new technologies. An analysis of emerging agricultural trends thus demands a framework that is able to negotiate the complex multi-scalar interplay between environmental, technological, scientific, political and economic factors. In this paper, we focus on the potential contribution of a synthesis between political ecology and Actor– Network Theory to our understanding of agricultural networks. We review the literature with a view to teasing out key insights and sketching out future research priorities. We focus on questions surrounding power and agency, the political ecology of scale and the role of situated knowledges and practices. Introduction Agriculture has been the subject of considerable research and policy attention over the last 10 years. Events such as the 2008 ‘world food price crisis’ have raised questions about the ability of global food production to meet growing demand (e.g. FAO 2008; Foresight 2011; World Bank 2008). There have been calls for a ‘New Green Revolution’ to develop new crop varieties to increase global food productivity, improve nutrition and help farmers cope with climate change (Godfray et al. 2010; Rockefeller 2006). Such developments follow more than a century of agricultural innovation and intensification, culminating in the agro-industrial model of production. At the same time, critics have raised concerns about the growing role of global agribusiness, the social and ecological impacts of new technologies (including genetically modified organisms – GMOs), the implications of trade liberalisation for farmers and the role of the financialisation of agricultural commodities in food price instability (Bernstein 2014; McMichael 2009). These trends point to the complex socio-environmental interactions that shape agriculture. An analysis of agricultural trends thus demands a framework that is able to negotiate the multi-scalar interplay between environmental, technological, scientific, political and economic factors. In this paper, we look at the potential contribution to our understanding of agricultural networks of a synthesis between political ecology (PE) and ideas from Science and Technology Studies (STS), more specifically Actor–Network Theory (ANT). From its emergence in the 1980s, PE has concerned itself with providing place-based understandings of the factors that shape human–environment interactions, with agriculture © 2015 The Author(s) Geography Compass © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd