First ALL-Ready consortium meeting held in Paris

We are pleased to announce that the first ALL-Ready annual consortium meeting was organised and hosted by INRAE last week. The in-person lively discussions among project partners, which we have missed so much during the pandemic, will certainly give a fresh boost to ALL-Ready’s contribution to the European agroecology partnership and future European network.

The first annual ALL-Ready consortium meeting took place on 8-9 March 2022 in Paris in a hybrid format, hosted by INRAE. Beside project partners, representatives of DG AGRI and the SCAR WG on agroecology have been also participating in the discussions.

The objectives of the meeting were to take stock of the achievements and main outcomes delivered so far, to foster the interconnection between the work packages and contextualise the activities of ALL-Ready within the future European partnership on agroecology living labs and research infrastructures. Last but not least, the partners discussed and confirmed the next steps for the second part of the project.

During the first day, project partners collected the main outputs of each work package and reflected on their contribution to agroecology transition, the future European network and the European agroecology partnership. The participants agreed that all outcomes contribute directly to the future network and/or to the European partnership while they all contribute indirectly to agroecology transition.

In order to deeper understand the outputs of the different work packages, project partners participated in several exercises, like putting themselves into the shoes of organization and initiatives working on agroecology transition. The feedback collected will be used to build a more robust questionnaire, which was designed to establish a certain threshold for the mapping of potential actors in agroecology transition.

During the second day, the participants focused on the future European network and the agroecology partnership by answering questions like:

How can the pilot network contribute to the future network and partnership? And how will the knowledge be shared in the future, e.g. between farmers?
What is the actual role of living labs and research infrastructures within the agroecology partnership?
How is the partnership and the network linked and how do they interact/communicate?
What are the added values of the network?

The participants agreed that regarding the activities, there is need for:

intensification of place-based initiatives,
improving the trans-disciplinarity of research connected to agroecology transition
collaboration with food system and soil mission partnerships, as well as EIP-Agri networks,
dissemination of research results to the research community.

Following up on this last point, the participants emphasised that the pilot and the future European network is/will be a good opportunity to build up and disseminate knowledge/evidence that is not only scientific but also practice/policy related. For an agroecology transition, from social and business aspects it will be important to engage the wider society and stakeholders in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, farmers should be acknowledged more for their knowledge, and local voices should be better heard at EU level. It was also highlighted that living labs and research infrastructures are brought together for the first time in the frame of the ALL-Ready project, providing a solid foundation for future networking.

As a final exercise, consortium partners were discussing the next activities by reflecting on the level of stakeholder engagement (inform, consult, involve, co-create). The goal was to reach a harmonised approach across work packages in order to ensure an appropriate level of stakeholder engagement.