The nexus between research impact and sustainability assessment: From stakeholders' perspective.

This article investigates the relationship between research impact and sustainability performance in Spain's agro-food sector through a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) system based on stakeholder evaluation, employing the ELECTRE III methodology. Four research and innovation (R&I) programmes—focused on sustainable rice cultivation, aquaculture recirculation systems, almond genetic cross-breeding, and meat production technology—were assessed across six sustainability pillars: economic, socio-territorial, environmental, health, capacity building, and political impacts. Stakeholders from diverse backgrounds evaluated these programmes using indicators and sub-indicators, revealing varied prioritizations but overall highlighting economic and capacity-building impacts as most significant. The study demonstrates how R&I implicitly contributes to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and provides a methodological tool to support policy-makers and practitioners in evaluating and prioritizing research for sustainable agro-food development. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the ELECTRE III approach, while the integration of Evaluation theory and Stakeholder theory underscores the value of participatory, multi-actor assessment in bridging scientific and societal perspectives on sustainability.