The horizontal objective of the project is to foster the social and educational value of European cultural heritage within its contribution to job creation, economic growth and social cohesion. The main field of the project is short food supply chain (SFSC) development which is one of the most relevant factors as well as a tool of European food cultural heritage maintenance. However, researches in recent years, as well as surveys of producers and consumers, have highlighted the problem that small producers have difficulties separately, so they need to work together to gain market access. Intermediate players have taken over some of these activities from producers. These are supply chain organizers who understand market and agricultural processes thus helping farmers to gain market access. Experts agreed that it is necessary to start a special SFSC organizer training and to develop special eligibility conditions, as well as the training of SFSC advisers, however, these development and support directions are still missing in practice.Therefore the partnership is committed to explore the possible ways on how to generate the position of a so-called Rural facilitator and to develop the necessary learning materials and training tools to train individuals who intend to take under this new profession in their career. The outcomes of the project will provide an innovative teaching approach where organisers can partake from capacity building which will strong economic impact on successful value chain organisation and rural employment development.The target group of the project:Organizers/animators potentially involved: resuming intellectual women; Employees of LEADER organizations; already existing market organizers; rural development NGO; restaurant suppliers; rural tourism organizers/providers, producers and restarters in rural areas.General objectives of the project:To map problems, necessary competencies and existing practices in the field, to survey on the required competencies of the potential rural facilitators. Based on the mapped hiatus and the targeted competencies, the project will build up a training material, a curriculum and will conduct pilot test phases, whose basis will be laid in the frame of a joint staff meeting. The project will compile and use all those knowledge bases and competencies of partners which can be channelled into this specific field and exploit them to social innovation by ways of adapting them to the material as well as passing on capacity building knowledge.Partnership:-The members of the partnership are all related actors of the agricultural sector but with various focuses and expertise. The consortium contains a university, a farmer representation body, National Union of Small Farmers and Service providers, a stakeholder for autonomous groups in agriculture and a regional development body, and a training centre.Activities of the project:1. The essence of the project is to assess the current real demand for competencies to be acquired (competence needs research in partnership): e.g. organizational skills, legislation, food safety, processing, marketing, logistics, communication (IO1- SOTA and Competence catalogue)2. Subsequently, the project partners will find out what rural development and business conditions are needed for these qualified specialists to be employed and earn their wages on a market basis (IO2-BUSINESS ROADMAP PREPARATION).3. Depending on local needs and capabilities, project partners prepare a joint learning material by integrating the adaptable points of the already existing knowledge basis (IO3-HANDBOOK)4. Channelling their knowledge from similar fields into our training, the French partner performs a Joint Staff Training (training of trainers). (Part of IO3)5. Based on the Handbook and results of IO1, pilot trainings will be implemented involving trainers who gained knowledge through the joint staff training. A curriculum and supplementing training tools will be elaborated (IO4- Curriculum and course)6. Multiplier events are foreseen to spread the results of the project in each country towards the end of the project. (Part of IO4) Main project results are· identifying rural facilitators in the partner countries· studying the necessary knowledge, competencies and circumstances of rural facilitators· enhancing social innovation by developing new curricula and handbook· fostering European food rural heritage due to small farming development· decreasing unemployment in rural areas· supporting access to healthy and trust foods for consumers.Partners will ensure the availability of project results for at least 5 years and will focus their efforts and means in order to, after the project completion, mainstream and multiply results, by creating handbooks and curricula in their countries and Europe.

BOND acknowledges the fundamental role farmers and land managers play in the environmental and economic sustainability of the farming sector in Europe, as well as the importance of the way they organise, on Europe’s foods and landscapes. BOND contributes to unleash, strengthen, and organise, the great potential for collective action and networking of individuals, groups and entities of farmers and land managers, focusing on countries with lower organisation levels, with a view to creating strong, dynamic and effective organizations that have a voice and a place in policy design. More specifically, BOND investigates and addresses the constraints and disincentives, and reaches a higher level of participation of farmers as follows: (i) Draw up solutions and build bonding capital within groups, ensuring cohesiveness and trust among people; (ii) Enable organizations to come closer, building bridging capital to form larger networks, help overcome attitudes and constraints that impede collective action; (iii) Build linking capital, developing ties with entities with different interests and powers, including government, donors, academia, private sector, to reach a stronger position in decision-making, and (iv) Engage multi actors and policy makers throughout these processes. BOND’s approach relies on 3 pillars: SEE-learning from success (mobilisation, study tours), LEARN-overcoming constraints (self-analysis, capacity building), TELL-affirming a position in the policy landscape (gaming interface, best practice in regulation, lab experiment), and on involving the youth, women and men (designing a road map for the future), with training sessions and meeting events at every step of the project (interregional forum, national workshops, regional policy roundtables, youth forum). BOND’s legacy will be a menu a la carte of practical processes, user-friendly, with methods and tools to guide end-users when they decide to engage and benefit from the synergies of working with others.

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.

IntercropValueES aims to exploit benefits of intercropping to design and manage productive, diversified, resilient, profitable, environmentally friendly cropping systems acceptable to farmers and actors in the agri-food chain. It will develop both a scientific research action for better understanding and modelling intimate intercrop functioning and a detailed analysis of lock-ins and levers at the value chain level to identify credible solutions that can be adopted by farmers and value chain actors. As a multi-disciplinary and multi-actor project, it brings together scientists and local actors representing food value chain. It includes 27 participants from 15 countries (3 continents) from a wide diversity of organizations and stakeholders. IntercropValuES organizes its activities in 6 objectives, to: 1) support the design of locally relevant, legitimate and innovative agri-food chains, through 13 Co-Innovation Case Studies; 2) understand the functioning and G*G*E*M interactions allowing the selection of compatible ideotypes and the optimization of machinery and management strategies for maximizing the productivity and delivery of ecosystem services with better soil health and mitigation of GHG (meta experiment 15 sites); 3) produce novel information, improved methods and tools for intercrop management and the assessment of their performance and profitability; 4) unravel intercropping performance by modelling; 5) analyze grain and sanitary quality of cereal-legume intercrops, functional qualities for food processing and new products, 6) uncover key barriers and levers at the value chain level to boost development, and identify new market avenues and solutions to increase economic added-value of intercrops. The Comms and Dissemination Plan is designed to diffuse outcomes widely by adapted channels to different end-users, such as farmers, advisors, food processing companies and machinery industries, retailers and citizens, academia, policymakers and influence bodies.