Institutionalizing agroecologies – IDAE

Agroecology, or, more accurately, several of its currents, has gain in recent years an important recognition, transforming from an “anti-establishment” model against the Green Revolution to an appropriate (or befitted) model to meet the challenges of global change. The success of agroecology is undeniable: of all currents critiquing the green revolution, this is the only one that has succeeded in being recognized as a viable agricultural model. This transformative process is accompanied by strong debates about what is or should be defined by the term agroecology, revealing thus the importance of speaking about agroecology in the plural form. The growing recognition of agroecologies is indeed marked by an increasing variety of forms of agriculture claiming themselves as forms of agroecology. If agroecology was an already very diverse field, its public recognition exacerbates this variability.
In the last few years agroecology grew from a set of discreet alternative forms of agriculture that challenged the conventional agricultural model to a wide variety of forms having in common to be presented as more sustainable forms of agriculture. The IDAE project aims at understanding the processes at stake, which we will approach as various and differentiated institutionalization processes. We will carefully investigate how the different agroecologies have stabilized through various institutional supports, how they interact among themselves and transform each other, and which effects these institutionalization processes have on agroecological practices on the ground.
We will identify and characterize the forms of institutionalization of agro-ecologies at the local, national and transnational scale. We will study the institutionalization of agroecologies at the inter/transnational scale in order to understand the overall context in which this process unfolds and to better contextualize the national case studies. Three large agricultural countries, where the debates on agroecology are both important and different, will be particularly studied: France, Brazil and Argentina. In each country, particular case studies will be analyzed at a fairly local level.
Scientific dynamics of the project we will base on two approaches: an approach through the study of the various domains where the institutionalization takes place: i.e. economic, political and scientific; an approach through case studies, allowing to observe and report on the institutionalization processes at stake.
The work will be structured around six work packages (WP). In the first (WP 1) the analysis of the institutionalization of agro-ecologies in France, Brazil and Argentina will be contextualized in view of global scale processes, by looking at how different agro-ecologies circulate. We will analyze in each country the policy (WP 2) and market dimensions (WP 3) of the institutionalization processes of agroecologies. Then we will be looking at how those processes result in a rearrangement of knowledge (WP 4). Finally, based on research conducted in the previous work packages, the last one (WP 5) will be devoted to the analysis of hybridization, coexistence and confrontations between conventional agriculture and agroecologies (WP 5). A coordination work package (WP 0) will be responsible for connecting the different work packages and partners to produce integrative studies.