Leitheiser and colleagues complicate the assumption that actionable knowledge is necessarily transformative. Their critical realist evaluation of agroecological co-innovation shows that knowledge can be useful, legitimate and strategically valuable while still conforming to the structural conditions responsible for unsustainability. The distinction between conforming and transforming effects becomes the paper’s central analytical device. Actionable knowledge is treated not merely as an output but as boundary-spanning intervention, yet the capacity of such intervention to generate structural change depends on pre-existing strategies, institutional configurations and broader constraints including market dependency, social acceleration and state-mediated accumulation. Methodologically, iterative reflection and validation are embedded within the research process, while causal explanation is extended across multiple contextual levels. The work bridges political agroecology, critical realism and transdisciplinary evaluation by relocating transformation from project intention to structural effect. It insists that co-production must analyse the systems it enters, not only the collaborations it creates.
