LIFT

Agroecological food system LIving labs for Farm and landscape Transformation

Duration: 05/2025 - 04/2028 (tbc)

Summary

This partnership responds to the urgent need for an agroecological transformation of landscapes by leveraging a food systems approach, with targeted public procurement of regional, seasonal, agroecological food as a driver.

Our approach is transdisciplinary, participatory and change-oriented by using action research in Living Labs (LLs). This means bringing together an array of actors with diverse perspectives to collaboratively address challenges, explore solutions and drive tangible change in the real world. The LLs will operate iterative cycles of action and research, each of which will imply mapping the current situation, envisioning desired futures, and planning and taking informed actions. Accompanying research by the project scientists will examine the LL processes and their outcomes in terms of agroecological transformation of landscapes.

The project builds on LLs in the southwest (PT, ES) and north (SE, DK, NO) of Europe, in locations where the consortium partners are actively engaged in initiatives encompassing multiple actor groups such as farmers, agricultural advisers, food distributors, canteen personnel and users, citizenry, municipalities and counties, including decision and policy makers.

Source: Tor Arvid Breland

Source: Tor Arvid Breland

The LL objectives are to:

1. facilitate multi-stakeholder LLs for developing agroecologically sound production, delivery, procurement and consumption of food in regional landscapes and connect these in an international network of LLs,

2. explore forces that support and hinder a transition to a more collaborative, regional, agroecologically sound food system and to develop concepts and tools for improving such a transition,

3. develop a participatory framework for evaluating impacts of the LL activities on the implementation of agroecological principles and practices and on ecological, economic, and social sustainability of farms, landscapes and the food systems under development.

These objectives will be achieved by participatory, multi-criteria and mixed methods, contributing to societal learning about sustainability pathways. Additional agroecological innovations will be:

· a roadmap for organising actors to develop place-based, agroecological, collaborative food systems with enhanced social, economic and environmental sustainability,

· multi-criteria sustainability analysis tools tailored to each LL and adaptable to new contexts

By addressing challenges in the southwest and north of Europe, the consortium not only promotes agroecological transformation in the landscapes concerned but also contributes to an international learning network and a transnational paradigm shift in how to tackle sustainability challenges in agrifood systems across varied environmental and socio-economic conditions.

Source: Tor Arvid Breland

The methods, tools and solutions generated in the LLs will be disseminated and scaled out through collaboration with stakeholders in “lighthouse” cases—examples of excellence that are trailblazing pathways to agroecological transformation—a partnership webpage, articles in social media and local and national newspapers and magazines, presentations at scientific conferences, scientific publications, and a network and learning platform developed in the Agroecology for Europe project (https://www.ae4eu.eu).