The overall purpose of this Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) is to define the general framework for strategic research and innovation activities to be undertaken under the future partnership “Accelerating Farming Systems Transition: Agroecology Living Labs and Research Infrastructures’’. The partnership aims to promote a European large-scale endeavour for an agricultural sector that is fit to meet the targets and challenges in relation to climate change, biodiversity loss, food security and sovereignty and the environment, while ensuring a profitable and attractive activity for farmers.

The Agroecology Partnership aims to coordinate and pool resources to lift lock-ins and enable and steer AE transition by integrating all relevant actors. It will provide the long-term and landscape perspectives needed to perform and test AE transition, by designing and implementing place-based innovations, setting the appropriate framework for improving knowledge on agricultural transition processes, and providing appropriate methodologies to steer, monitor and evaluate co-creation practices, transition outcomes, and their impacts. The Agroecology Partnership will also put in place mechanisms for science-policy dialogue in support of the establishment, implementation, and evaluation of evidence-based policies (research and sectoral) endorsing AE transition, including long-term funding for AE R&I.

Four core themes

Core Theme 1 - Redesigning agroecosystems.

Core Theme 2 - Redesigning agroecology value chains.

Core Theme 3 - Agroecology Living Labs (LLs) and Research Infrastructures (RIs) as instruments enhancing multi-actor involvement for AE transition and the acceleration of creation and adoption of innovations.

Core Theme 4 - Enablers of agroecology transition.

International dimension

Due to the global dimension of agroecology, the partnership will promote international collaboration supporting the alignment of agendas and to the extent possible, alignment of activities to create synergies with relevant international organisations, such as FAO and UNEP or the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR), and initiatives such as the Agroecology Coalition or the Transformative Partnership Platform on Agroecology. It will also foster the collaboration with non-European partners, including research and academic organisations such as the Latin-American Scientific society on Agroecology (SOCLA) but also grass-root organisations in other regions of the world, where experience could benefit European partners, especially on co-creation processes.

It is expected that one of the first activities of the future partnership will be to map the potential international partners that would bring an added value to the partnership both by providing a global view and knowledge on AE and also by scaling up the agroecology activities and solutions developed in the EU at the international level. Additionally, synergies will be explored with the Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA) as part of the African Union-EU High Level Policy Dialogue on Science Technology and Innovation.