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The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri-food systems. The 'multi-level perspective' is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g. regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent 'hybrid forums' can provide a space between niche and regime where niche innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (postgraduate diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a 'hybrid forum'. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what

Abstract:The wide-ranging literature on food systems provides multiple perspectives and world views. Various stakeholders define food and food systems in non-equivalent ways. The perception of the performance of food systems is determined by these specific perspectives, and a wide variety of policies responding to different aims are proposed and implemented accordingly. This paper sets out to demonstrate that the pre-analytical adoption of different narratives about the food system leads to non-equivalent assessments of the performance of food supply chains. In order to do so, we (i) identify a set of relevant narratives on food supply chains in Spanish and Catalan contexts; (ii) identify the pertinent attributes needed to describe and represent food supply chains within the different perspectives or narratives; and (iii) carry out an integrated assessment of three organic tomato supply chains from the different perspectives. In doing so, the paper proposes an analysis of narratives to enable the analyst to characterize the performance of food supply chains from different perspectives and to identify the expected trade-offs of integrated assessment, associating them with the legitimate-but-contrasting views found among the social actors involved.