How to promote innovation and interdisciplinarity in organic food and farming research evaluation

Summary

The development of organic food and farming research calls for system-oriented, innovative, interdisciplinary approaches. The process of evaluating research proposals is a crucial step towards this objective. Based on the EU CORE Organic pilot call for joint transnational research projects, we analysed to what extent the evaluation criteria and procedures implemented address this issue. Feedback on the experience of the target groups involved in this call was gathered and discussed in relation to findings from the literature. Our results show that interdisciplinary and innovative aspects could be better addressed, and evaluation criteria more clearly defined and delimited. This entails reshaping the main criteria and developing more suitable evaluation categories and sub-criteria. We also suggest creating mechanisms to enable funding of a few “risky” research projects, to facilitate entry of newcomers to the arena, to promote exploratory research projects and to support longitudinal interaction among applicants and assessors.