Innovations

While some models of change are essentially based on occasional or incremental innovations, others require more radical rethinking of farming systems.

• They may require a major redesign of the forms of coordination between actors, for example the design of landscape fostering biological regulation.
• Similarly, the design of new cropping systems based, for example, on a diversity of species (e.g. associated crops) and a reduction in inputs requires to consider the ways in which these systems can be disseminated among farming systems and at supply chain levels: technological barriers during the harvest/collect/storage/process phases, organizational constraints, etc.
• In addition, the incompleteness of knowledge at the time of practices implementation leads to new forms of rationality for the actors in the agricultural value chains. This incompleteness may relate to ecological processes (e.g. the role of associated diversity), to the difficulty of observing ecosystem states and predicting the effects of practices, but also to the objectives assigned to the system and the relationships between stakeholders. Taking these uncertainties into account means rethinking the contribution of researchers to innovation.
   

Given the wide diversity of farming contexts (soil, climate, biological, socio-economic), agroecological practices need to be adapted locally to provide the range of ecosystem services we are aiming at. Therefore, innovation processes need to be analyzed and supported as situated processes, involving the creation of local innovation networks that enable in situ learning. In addition, the agroecological transition requires greater integration of existing links and links to be made between socio-ecological and socio-technical systems.