Methods For Understanding Learning And Innovation Networks To Support Transition Towards Sustainable Agriculture – The Approach Of The EU Research Project SOLINSA

Summary

Methods For Understanding Learning And Innovation Networks To Support Transition Towards Sustainable Agriculture – The Approach Of The EU Research Project SOLINSA
Transition to sustainable agriculture can be seen as radical innovation, which is driven by various factors.
The EU research project SOLINSA looks at the particular role that Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (LINSA) play in bringing about change.
LINSAs respond to the demand for agriculture in transition by developing new intermediary tasks and roles and involving new actors and institutions into alliances for objectives that contribute to sustainability.
Acting at the boundaries of established policy networks, LINSAs connect different policy authorities to create common frameworks. Consequently, they facilitate integration and adaptation of policies to given contexts.
One important goal of SOLINSA is to investigate strategies to better interconnect formal Agricultural Knowledge Systems (AKS) with grassroots actors and stakeholders. We will do this by developing a twolayered transdisciplinary learning methodology that will be applied in case studies in the eight participating countries.
This contribution to the 24th ESRS Congress will present the methodology. The first layer consists of exploring learning processes in LINSAs by observing and analyzing them interactively with LINSA stakeholders in a set of workshops. Co‐production of knowledge between project partners and the LINSAs will be supported. The second layer examines learning at a meta level by evaluating and monitoring the applied transdisciplinary approach.
Until now, a first iteration of methodology development has been undertaken by presenting the methodological framework at the kick‐off meeting of the SOLINSA project. The project partners discussed concrete ideas about methods to include in the methodology. On the basis of this workshop, the
methodology is further developed, and will be discussed again before being implemented in the case studies.