ALL-Ready workshop

The three-year ALL-Ready project was officially launched in December 2020, with the primary aim of preparing and testing a European network of agro-ecological living laboratories and research infrastructures (within the framework of the European Partnership on Agroecology), enabling the transition to agroecology across Europe. Through its results, the project will establish the preconditions and activities of the future network. In addition, it relies on participatory, real-life experimentation, and so itself embraces a living laboratory approach. 

In the first phase, during 2021, the vision and mission of the future network will be developed (WP1). One of the most important steps towards this is to place agro-ecological transition, agro-ecological living laboratories and agro-ecological research infrastructures within a common conceptual framework across Europe - as these concepts remain little known and difficult for many to define. 

Thus, the ALL-Ready project partners have developed an initialconceptual framework for defining agroecological transition, which was outlined on 26 April 2021 at the project’s first online workshop, mainly attended by agroecology researchers, experts and decision makers. That is, the aim of the workshop was to refine and validate the conceptual framework of the agro-ecological transition developed by the consortium, which was built around four main elements. Overall, it was necessary to work out a framework for activities (responsible governance, co-creation, resource management, climate adaptation, etc.) and policy incentives (decentralization, support for food sovereignty, participation, etc.) relevant to the agro-ecological transition, and to identify the values that guide their implementation (synergies, efficiency, resilience, knowledge co-creation, etc.) and the competencies and skills (system-level thinking, digital skills, horizontal learning, knowledge of agro-ecological technologies, etc.) that need to be developed to achieve transition. 

A detailed description of the four elements is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxlRp3OT2zM 

As part of the online work, participants discussed and further developed the four elements needed for agro-ecological transition in four parallel sections. However, this shared work is far from over, because a second workshop will be held in the autumn of 2021. As part of this, the conceptual framework, further developed in the first round, will be introduced to a wider range of participants (farmers, consumer organizations, public authorities, businesses, etc.), complemented by the conceptual framework for agro-ecological living laboratories and agro-ecological research infrastructures.