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An interdisciplinary joint research unit

The UMR AGIR brings together researchers and faculty in biotechnical sciences and human and social sciences from INRAE (the AgroEcoSystem and ACT departments), INP-Toulouse (Agro-Toulouse and Ecole d'ingénieurs de Purpan) and ENSFEA, as well as staff from ACTA and Agropolis international.

Conceptualizing, analyzing and providing tools for the sustainable transition of agri-food systems

The UMR AGIR perceives the agricultural transition as the need to leave an unsustainable situation. Unsustainable agri-food systems lead to undesirable effects on the environment (water over-consumption and pollution, soil degradation, biodiversity decline), on farmers' income, consumer and worker health, animal welfare, regional inequalities... However, transforming agri-food systems is challenged by:

• The complexity of redesigning locally-adapted systems and integrating the interactions between farming practices, supply chains, consumers and multi-level policy;
• The uncertainties related to unpredictable events and hazards (such as climatic), to incomplete knowledge and to emergent properties resulting from the interactions of multiples elements in complex systems, which limit our ability to predict the effects of changes;
• The ambiguity that can arise from disagreement over the interests of the diverse solutions. Controversies can arise, as in the case of digitalization. The challenge is to know whether and how these innovations contribute to sustainable development.

Accompanying the transition is viewed as an on-going evolutionary process, to which researchers of the UMR AGIR contribute through participatory research. Our aim is to understand, nurture and support the three stages of this evolutionary process:

• the creation of innovations (knowledge, concepts, models, objects, practices, tools, organizations, etc.) through research station and on-farm experiment, modeling or co-designing;
• the selection of innovations, by analyzing the tests that innovations undergo to become viable, by designing tools and assessment frameworks, and by identifying the validity domain of certain knowledge;
• the co-evolution, by studying the reconfigurations associated with the deployment of certain innovations within socio-technical systems. Participatory methods and pragmatic studies are also designed to foster this co-evolution.

The UMR AGIR produces an understanding of changing agri-food systems that is useful for collective action (public policies, territorial actions, etc.). We also generate actionable knowledge for developing biodiversity-based agriculture (e.g. through crop diversification, grazing management, connecting and fostering local exchanges between crop and livestock, deriving locally adapted plants from participatory breeding, etc.), methods for assessing it (agroecological diagnosis, multi-criteria frameworks, intermediary processes, etc.) and supporting its development (serious games, decision-making tools, participatory approaches, etc.).