Agro living Labs: Creating innovative, sustainable, resilient and social inclusive food systems

Abstract

In response to climate, biodiversity, environmental, economic and social challenges to rural and peri-urban areas, an emergent type of living labs (LLs) has been developed: the ‘Agro Living Labs (ALLs)’. Various EU initiatives (e.g. the European Green Deal, the New European Bauhaus, the Farm to Fork strategy, the Biodiversity strategy) as well as the UN 2030 Agenda, highlight the need to direct towards agroecology. ALLs is a relatively new but very promising approach in agroecology practices. However, more practice-oriented research is needed to better understand how ALLs can help to effectively implement open and user-oriented innovations, to stimulate collaboration between different stakeholders in the community, to trigger cross-sectoral alliances and to build inclusive societies. This study aims to initiate a discussion around key elements of the ‘living lab way of working’ in agroecological food systems. Several scholars converge that we need to shed light upon particular approaches, methods, techniques, and tools that are used in real-life contexts to understand the opportunities offered by ALLs to peri-urban and rural areas. The authors suggest that ALLs, as Co-creating, Agroecological, Socio-Technical (CAST) systems, can help to address food systems crises, and to promote sustainability, integrity, equity, inclusiveness, resilience, circularity and productivity.

Territorial Dynamics Supported by a Collaborative Network of Innovation Labs: Toward an Approach to Establish a Portfolio of Indicators to Monitor and Assess their Territorial Impact

“…These analyses demonstrate the role of ILs in contributing to the five concepts of sustainable territory development. Innovation labs create new forms of governance and develop cooperation between various actors in the territory to create new knowledge or new supply chain (Trivellas et al, 2023). Moreover, they can function as intermediaries because of their access to many actors.…”

“…IL "objective is to bring together forest owners to pool their resources in order to create more coordinated management units for wood harvesting" "the main positive impact observed concerns governance in the forestry sector"(Trivellas et al, 2023) "Setting a LL in a rural area can transform this area into a dynamic innovation hub, spatially localized and digitally interconnected, that is able to revitalize the broader area offering remarkable developmental opportunities. An ALL can be designed to enhance the entire food supply chain from farm to fork" Governance sustainability focus(Bevilacqua et al, 2020) IL "demonstrates the possibility of an effective urban governance through a new dynamic organizational pattern based on a horizontal multi-sectoral collaboration"(Meister Broekema et al, 2022) "The potential added value of the concept perhaps does not lie in its newness or uniqueness, but in its power rather to transform static institutions, such as governments or universities, into more outward facing institutions, by including external stakeholders and/or work in a novel way."…”