Elsevier

Journal of Rural Studies

Volume 83, April 2021, Pages 257-267
Journal of Rural Studies

Building agroecology with people. Challenges of participatory methods to deepen on the agroecological transition in different contexts

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.02.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The diversity of stakeholders involved will determine the role of the research team and the results of the action – research process.

  • Rural and urban contexts differ in terms of actors, challenges involved, design requirements and results.

  • Farmers are usually disconsidered in urban or desagrarized contexts and require specific power management strategies.

  • Public policies stakeholders are involved in more complex processes, in terms of stakeholders involved and type of results.

  • The dialogue between academia and farmers is a challenge when building horizontal processes, whatever the context is.

Introduction

Agroecology was formulated from a transformative epistemological standpoint that proposes to do “science with people” (Guzmán et al., 2000; Francis et al., 2003; Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle, 2011; Levidow et al., 2014). Numerous publications propound Participatory Action Research as a way of generating knowledge useful to local communities and to transformative food movements, all under the umbrella of sustainability (among others, Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle, 2011; Putnam et al., 2014; Méndez et al., 2017; López-García et al., 2018; Calvet-Mir et al., 2018). This approach also targets ethical issues, in line with an effort to dissolve the power structures created around scientific knowledge and its monopoly over the production of “truth” (Harding, 1991; Fricker, 2007; Kindon et al., 2007; Bacon et al., 2013; Levidow et al., 2014). The so-called agroecological transition is embedded in this conceptual framework (Lamine, 2011; Calle et al., 2013; Duru, 2015; Darnhofer, 2014; Méndez et al., 2016; López-García et al. 2018). The components of social change and transformation of reality are transversal to this approach (Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle, 2011), often navigating within a vague space between research and action (Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle, 2011; Guzmán et al., 2013; Méndez et al., 2016; López-García et al., 2018).

The epistemological justification for participatory science has gained a wide consensus, and its epistemological and methodological bases applied to agroecology have been profusely discussed in theoretical terms (Guzmán et al., 2000; Cerf, 2011; Méndez et al., 2016). The past three decades have seen the emergence of broadly used methodological approaches such as Participatory Action-Research (PAR) and Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA). Both approaches lie on the epistemological and methodological principles of Popular Education and aim to build community empowerment through collective action-reflection processes (Freire, 1975; Patton, 2017). The former is a research methodology that combines theory, action and participation in a commitment to further the interests of exploited groups and classes through a series of techniques that combine knowledge and power analysis (Fals-Borda, 1987). The latter is a family of participatory approaches for sustainable rural development that incorporate methods to enhance the ability of rural communities to share, improve and analyse knowledge that concerns their livelihoods – and through this knowledge, to plan and develop self-determined actions (Chambers, 1994).

The agroecological scientific literature based on empirical data on the agroecological transition is scarce (Guzmán et al., 2013; Méndez et al., 2017), and has been mostly applied at the farm-scale. Recent debates on agroecological transitions and scaling agroecology (among others: Gliessman, 2016; Mier et al., 2018; Ferguson et al., 2019), have raised the scale of agroecological analysis to the food system. Meanwhile, both rural subjects and the features and logics of the (corporate) food regime that shapes their context have undergone great transformations in last decades (Borras, 2009; McMichael, 2014; Bernstein, 2017). Thus new elements of complexity on the conception of agroecological transitions and the participatory methods to support them are introduced. Thus, a more complex and renovated approach to agroecological, participatory research is needed (Ollivier et al. 2018; Magda et al. 2019).

With this article we intend to contribute to taking on these challenges. With this aim, we have compared eight case studies of participatory research in agroecology in six different countries of Europe and Latin America. Based on the analysis carried out, we aim to discuss the main learnings and challenges that emerge in the development of agroecological transitions through participatory methodologies, considering different scales, contexts and stakeholders involved.

With the emergence of the food sovereignty paradigm in the 1990s, the politico-cultural proposals of agroecology took on special importance (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Cuéllar-Padilla et al., 2013; McMichael, 2016; Rosset and Altieri, 2017). The issue of power and decision-making in relation to agri-food systems, explicitly denounced by the food sovereignty paradigm, found interesting answers in agroecology and in the experience it had thus far accumulated (Cuéllar-Padilla and Sevilla, 2013; Rivera-Ferré, 2018). Especially relevant was Participatory-Action Research (PAR) (Méndez et al., 2016), which built on early criticisms of rural extension (Freire, 1969, 1975), as well as some relevant methodological approaches for sustainable, participatory rural extension, namely Participatory Action-Research (Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991), Participatory Rural Appraisal (Chambers, 1994), and Farmers' Participatory Research (Farrington and Martin, 1988).

The need for adequate methodological approaches related to power issues has been stressed in recent scientific debates on the “scaling up”, the “massification” or the “institutionalization” of agroecology (González de Molina, 2013; Parmentier, 2014; Giraldo and Rosset, 2017; Mier et al., 2018; Rivera-Ferré, 2018). The role of the state in agroecological transitions and the institutionalization of agroecology is questioned (Sanderson and Ioris, 2017; González de Molina et al., 2019), and the protagonism of peasant and food movements is found to be at stake, thus requiring to be promoted (Giraldo and Rosset, 2017; Giraldo and McCune, 2019) and often even constructed (López-García et al., 2018, 2019). But the state is not alone in posing such challenges. The transformations affecting the conditions and features of peasantry worldwide, the wide expansion of rural poverty and hunger, and the increasing complexity of the global food chain under the Corporate Food Regime (Borras, 2009; Bernstein, 2010, 2017; McMichael, 2016) have originated a diversification of the subjects of the agroecological transitions (López-García et al., 2019), articulating wide alliances among urban and rural stakeholders (Holt-Giménez and Shattuck, 2011; Giraldo and McCune, 2019; González de Molina et al., 2019; López-García and González de Molina, 2020), and also giving way to new negotiation arenas.

Therefore complex approaches to sustainability, taking into consideration the food system scale, are required. In recent years, a wider diversity of issues for PAR processes applied to agroecology have entered the corpus of English scientific literature, resulting from the effort to raise the territorial scale. These includes social, economic and political issues, as well as the collective dimension of agroecological transitions. Such issues had previously been embedded, more or less explicitly, in the Spanish and Portuguese scientific agroecological literature that since the early 1990s was already incorporating such complexity (Hecht, 1995; Costa Gomes, 2005; Caporal et al., 2006; Sevilla, 2006; Prévost, 2019; Cuéllar-Padilla and Sevilla, 2019). Research on Participatory Guarantee Systems (Cuéllar-Padilla and Calle, 2011), short food-supply chains and local logistics network development (Guzmán et al., 2013; Bacon et al., 2014; Moragues-Faus et al., 2015; Méndez et al., 2017), the construction of farmers' and community organizations (Daniel, 2011; Bacon et al., 2013), gender inequality (Bezner-Kerr et al. 2018), or urban food policies (López-García et al., 2019) has incorporated such diversity and complexity of issues. This trend also appears to be related to a larger volume of research in territories of the Global North, and to the emergence of so-called ‘urban agroecology’ (Tornaghi and Dehaene, 2019; López-García and González de Molina, 2020).

Networks have been highlighted as a major lever within socio-technical transitions, specially regarding the dissemination of socio-technical innovations (Elzen et al., 2012; Bui et al., 2016; Magrini et al., 2019). Research into this topic has shown a weak theoretical framework to be an issue in socio-technical transitions (see e.g. Wezel et al., 2016; Duru et al., 2015; Méndez et al., 2016), which hinders the development of said processes (Sanderson and Ioris, 2017). The Multi-Level Perspective (see e.g. Levidow et al., 2013; Elzen et al., 2018; Magrini et al., 2019) has been noted as an appropriate strategy to understand and promote the up-scaling of local agroecological transition processes to regional or higher levels, and to provide an appropriate theoretical framework for the transition (Levidow et al., 2014; Sanderson and Ioris, 2017). However, such an approach doesn't provide the technical basis to work and activate real world processes with people. A combination of Multi-Level Perspective and Participatory Action-Research has been proposed as an adequate solution (Ollivier et al., 2018; López-García et al., 2018) but has not been further developed.

The complexity of such an operational approach to agroecological transitions raises the question of the participatory methodological approaches to be developed: what key elements and characteristics should these methodologies contain? What methodological challenges do we face, given the diversity of stakeholders and contexts in which agroecological transitions are taking place?

Section snippets

Methodology

This article emerged as a result of the comparative analysis of eight case studies that were presented and discussed in the Working Group on “Participatory and activist research”, at the VII International Congress of Agroecology, held in Córdoba, Spain, in May 2018.

A broad call for contributions was developed that ended in the selection of 16 papers to be presented and discussed in the working group. Authors were asked to systematize their case studies following the same schema: the theoretical

Results

The different types of results obtained from the analysis of the case studies are summarized in Table 3.

Results of relevance to participating actors

The results that are relevant to participants fall under three main groups, namely: material results, social-political results, and epistemological results. Each one of these were codified and systematized based on the documentation contributed for each case.

Material results correspond to concrete and often physical solutions to identified problems, or the materialization of identified collective dreams or desires. The different types of material results identified are shown in Fig. 1

In this

Credit author statement

Daniel López-García, Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Translation Funding acquisition. Mamen Cuéllar-Padilla, Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. de Azevedo Olival, Alexandre, Investigation, Writing - review. Laranjeira, Nina Paula, Investigation, Writing – review. V. Ernesto Méndez, Investigation, Writing – review. Santiago Peredo y Parada,

Funding

This article was supported by the Fund “Grants for the Third Sector” from the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition (2020).

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