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The ecologisation of agriculture through the prism of collaborative innovation
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How do the innovation platforms and facilitated networks currently deployed in the Global South help trigger dynamics of collaborative innovation that can be useful for the agroecological transition? What are the difficulties encountered and how can they be overcome?This chapter throws lights on these questions. The first part justifies the interest in studying the ecologisation of agriculture through the prism of collaborative innovation and of its paradoxes. The second part describes a diversity of collaborative mechanisms mobilized at different levels at which the agroecological transition is organized. Examples from Burkina Faso and Cameroon illustrate the different organizational forms mobilized and the way in which they help overcome certain paradoxes of collaborative innovation in order to make actors move forward. The conclusion provides a perspective for future research.
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... Technical changes can be achieved at the cropping or livestock system scale, but the overall agroecological transition requires changes in the organization at farm, landscape, regional, and agri-chain levels, jointly with an evolution of public policies and consumer initiatives at national and global levels (Tittonell et al. 2016;Cerdan et al. 2019). This holistic approach is mainly justified by the need to manage increasingly scarce and fragile resources used by multiple actors with divergent interests not only at the territorial scale but also at national and international scales (Piraux et al. 2019;Toillier et al. 2019) and at the level of markets and value-chains (Cerdan et al. 2019). This second pillar leads to the close linking of agroecological transition to the transition to sustainable food systems (Gliessman 2015). ...
... The various agroecological transition pathways should be embedded, designed, and implemented in local systems in an adaptive and collaborative way. Researchers have reported that small farmers in the tropical countries must play a central role in the transition to agroecology (Le Coq et al. 2019;Sourisseau et al. 2019;Toillier et al. 2019). Local farmer innovations are frequently useful for transforming traditional systems into agroecological systems (Périnelle et al. 2021). ...
To promote greater sustainability in agriculture, development of agroecology is increasingly being invoked. What are the conditions for establishing agroecological production in tropical regions? Based upon case studies in several tropical areas, we provide here some answers to this question. We review the “pillars” (i.e. principles) and the “implementation levers” (i.e., tools) for the development of agroecology. We identify three main pillars: (1) the mobilization and management of ecological processes for the sustainable production and the resilience of agroecosystems; (2) the development of interactions between technical, social, environmental, and institutional components of agroecosystems for a holistic approach to agroecology; and (3) the scaling up of agroecology that takes place with a plurality of actions and pathways at different organization levels rather than an increase in resources and a replication of standardized technical processes. To implement these three pillars, we identify 11 main bio-technical, cognitive, socio-political, and organizational levers. Bio-technical levers include those for (1) mobilizing complementarity between crop species to optimize natural resources use, (2) mobilizing functional biodiversity at the plot scale to optimize natural regulation of pests and diseases, (3) managing biodiversity at landscape and territorial scales, (4) increasing the efficiency of biogeochemical cycles, and (5) renewing targets for genetic improvement. Cognitive, socio-political, and organizational levers include those for (6) political and institutional action at the national and global level, (7) action at the local level to support producers, (8) political and organizational action at the territorial level, (9) the marketing and the development of new agri-chains, (10) the development of new methods for evaluating production systems, and (11) the recognition of the values of gender and generation within families and other organisational levels. This paper provides an overall orientation for the agroecological transition in tropical agriculture and also considers the socio-political context that underlies this transition.
After two decades of research on sustainable intensification (SI), namely securing food production on less environmental cost, heterogeneous understandings and perspectives prevail in a broad and partly fragmented scientific literature. Structuring and consolidating contributions to provide practice-oriented guidelines are lacking. The objectives of this study are to (1) comprehensively explore the academic SI literature, (2) propose an implementation-oriented conceptual framework, and (3) demonstrate its applicability for region-specific problem settings. In a systematic literature review of 349 papers covering the international literature of 20 years of SI research, we identified SI practices and analysed temporal, spatial and disciplinary trends and foci. Based on key SI practices, a conceptual framework was developed differentiating four fields of action from farm to regional and landscape scale and from land use to structural optimisation. Its applicability to derive region-specific SI solutions was successfully tested through stakeholder processes in four European case studies. Disciplinary boundaries and the separation of the temporal and spatial strands in the literature prevent a holistic address of SI. This leads to the dominance of research describing SI practices in isolation, mainly on the farm scale. Coordinated actions on the regional scale and the coupling of multiple practices are comparatively un-derrepresented. Results from the case studies demonstrate that implementation is extremely context-sensitive and thus crucially depends on the situational knowledge of farmers and stakeholders. Although, there is no 'one size fits all' solution, practitioners in all regions identified the need for integrated solutions and common action to implement suitable SI strategies at the regional landscape level and in local ecosystems.
Capacity development for innovation is emerging as a new way to ensure sustainable development in developing countries. In the agricultural sector, innovation is essentially collective, which calls on researchers to step out of their role as producers of knowledge in order to engage with innovating actors. While a diversity of engaged research practices has emerged, there is not yet a clear understanding of the different ways in which researchers contribute to innovation. The aim of this paper is to identify the types of contribution of researchers to capacity-development for innovation. To this end, the authors have developed an ex post analytical framework that puts into perspective two corpus of literature: on learning and management of innovation. This framework makes it possible to characterize sequences of learning situations and a variety of postures of researchers at different stages of innovation in order to account for their contributions. Based on an in-depth study of thirteen innovation cases in which the French Agricultural Centre for International Development (CIRAD) was engaged with its Southern research partners, four types of contribution of researchers to capacity development to innovate have been identified: to facilitate learning in an unsupervised way; to plan and manage learning processes; to create and respond to learning needs step by step; to be guided by the exploration and needs of end-users. Our results suggest that strategic management of innovation processes by research organizations could be made possible by the monitoring and evaluation of learning situations, on the one hand to strengthen researchers' capacity to innovate, and on the other hand, to better coordinate the skills and resources available, to change the mandates of researchers and to rationalize their investments.
Bien loin d'une simple fusion entre agronomie et écologie, l'agroécologie apparaît comme un projet innovant, qui se positionne à la fois dans le champ des sciences de la nature, des sciences économiques et sociales, de la politique et de l'action. L'agroécologie nous conduit à explorer de nouveaux champs de savoir, aux interfaces entre disciplines, sur les impacts agronomiques des régulations biologiques autant que sur les systèmes socioécologiques. Mais, plus encore, elle nous engage à faire évoluer nos manières de travailler : développer les approches systémiques, en renonçant aux séduisantes simplifications du type « un problème, un intrant » ; revaloriser les savoirs locaux et les mettre en synergie avec les savoirs scientifiques ; décloisonner l'innovation, en repositionnant l'agriculture au sein des territoires et des systèmes alimentaires ; enfin, favoriser les dynamiques d'apprentissage individuel et collectif, source d'innovation et d'adaptation aux situations locales.
To underline the need for radical, systemic changes, we have chosen the term “AgroEcological Transitions” for the title of this volume. It stresses that a transition towards sustainable agriculture requires more than improving agribusiness as usual. To us, agroecology refers to broad and varied processes of experimentation and innovation that often start in niches and have the potential of transforming the dominant agri-food system into a more sustainable one. Analysing these ongoing processes will increase our understanding of transformative change. The chapters of this book reflect the need for such insights by analysing a broad variety of agroecological ‘breakthroughs-in-the-making’.
In this paper, we analyze intermediary work in the context of sustainability transitions in relation to what we call the “environmental paradox”. While sustainability transitions are strongly related to political or social expectations in terms of management performance and measurable results and effects, environmental problems have some generic characteristics which make these expectations partly unachievable. Those recover the notions of interdependency, complexity, uncertainty and controversy. We argue those key features condition understanding and concrete achievement of intermediary work. Drawing upon biographic narratives of intermediary actors (extension worker, mandated intermediary workers, group of experts and researcher, NGO member), we use contrasting examples to propose a comprehensive reading of what makes their strategies effective regarding the development of political narratives and of learning processes in the context of the management of ‘wicked problems’. Our crosscutting approach allows us to advocate that such an intermediary work cover a set of roles or functions which involve strong articulation of objectification processes with inter-subjectivation. Then, the properties of intermediary work may be regarded as the capacity intermediary workers develop to contextualize their own activity, to create the conditions of their own performativity, both being strongly related to intermediary workers reflexive consciousness.
The Innovation policies since 2011 in the agri-chains in Côte d’Ivoire are based on the designing of a tool of technology transfer witch is qualified “Innovation Platforms” to introduce of improved varieties and hybrids plants. This article focuses on particularly the implications of the “Plantain Innovation Platforms” (PIP) in the reorientation of local technologies choices and consequently to improve food independence through increased domestic food products supplies. We use the conceptual framework of Sectoral System of Innovation (SSI). This framework helps to characterize the functioning of the PIP. We have identifying four components which structure this socio-technological innovations: Research component, Dissemination component, Value Chain
component and Financing component. Our results shows that PIPs help to structure the SSI by influencing the public policy decision process (research and innovation) in the selection of the introduced cultivars, the cultural practices and also the food preferences,integrating geographic diversity of recipients of this innovations. These policies changes involve the consideration of the needs of local producers and consumers
The problem of this issue questioned the interactions between changes in models of innovation, the greening of the production function and their social consequences. Six innovation processes are analyzed in the Agriculture of Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Haiti, Madagascar, Senegal respectively. These situations coincide in demonstrating that collaborative innovation models are particularly useful for development, as they adapt the process studied to local needs. These models involve more commitment of public policy innovation.
