Research project AgroPolis

Summary

The term agroecology emerged more than a century ago to promote food system sustainability. Key conceptual frameworks of agroecology include the 13 Agroecology Principles and the 10 Elements of Agroecology. Today, European awareness and uptake of agroecology remains limited, and it is estimated that fewer than three percent of European farms are fully agroecological. Food value chains largely depend on long, global networks contradicting agroecology’s focus on locality, diversity, and equity. While a key barrier for a transition towards agroecology is lack of business models that integrate the food system from farm to fork, most agroecology research so far focus on farm practices. Taking a value chain and systemic view on the transition to agroecology, it is clear that the transition cannot happen in isolation from the rest of the economic system. Agroecology represents a move towards increased diversity and plurality of values and practices, a perspective that is echoed in the beyond growth vision of the economy.

With this backdrop, the main objective of the AgroPolis project is ‘to co-create agroecology value chain innovations, future visions and related policies fit for a beyond-growth Europe’.

The sub objectives are:

1. Develop a new evalution framework integrating agroecology principles into a value chain sensitive evaluation framework (WP2)
2. Identify and analyse key structural barriers preventing the transformation to agroecology value chains at European and national levels (WP3)
3. Create a set of local and regional level living-labs to co-create new agroecology value chain innovations and pilot activities (WP4b-g)
4. Create a cross-country policy hub to co-create new ideas for European and national level agroecology policies to promote agroecologyvalue chains fit for a beyond-growth Europe (WP4a)
5. Analyse and synthesize living-lab findings to develop improved agroecology value chains (WP5), future visions and related policies fit for abeyond-growth Europe (WP6)
6. Disseminate findings to relevant practitioners and policymakers at local to European levels (WP7)

The AgroPolis project use living-labs as a vehicle to include stakeholders along the whole value chain to co-create agroecology value chain innovations and future visions and policies fit for a beyond-growth Europe.

The AgroPolis concept (see figure 1) is centred around the two-tiered multi-actor living-lab:

1. Tier 1 of the living-lab structure consists of six national living-labs (WPs 4b-g) geographically distributed across Europe (Germany, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden).
2. Tier 2 is the cross-country policy hub (WP4a) that focus on developing agroecology value chain related policy at national and European levels.

Feeding into the living-lab will be two research activities: (1) development of an agroecology value chain evaluation method (WP2) and (2) a cross-country comparative policy analysis looking at integration of, and barriers to, agroecology principles in national food policy (WP3).

The output from the living-labs will be synthesized in two work packages which produce key outcomes for practitioners and policy makers (WPs 5 and 6 respecitvely). The agroecology potential of the value chain innovations and policies will be tested using the evaluation methodology developed in WP2. Key to the AgroPolis concept is dissemination and communication (WP7) of the process and the project outcomes.

Top image: agroecology value chain innovation and policy. Source: Bjørn Vidar Vangelsten