STRUCTURING TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ON AGROECOLOGY: COMPARING 10+ YEARS OF CO-INNOVATION IN URUGUAY AND THE EU

In this proceeding, we draw on the authors’ experiences with co-innovation projects to compare contextual and organizational factors and discern differences in tangible sustainability outcomes between Uruguay and the European Union. All projects report positive effects of the way of working instilled by the co-innovation governance approach, providing safe spaces for developing novel insights, discussing tensions and reaching agreement on ways ahead. We found clear differences in the way of organizing researcher involvement. In the Uruguayan projects, a team of researchers and farm advisors developed characterization, diagnosis, and redesign activities on farms, and they accompanied farmers during the implementation and evaluation of the farm plans. In the EU projects, both the geographical and the epistemological distance between the project and the farmers (and other actors) was mediated through network facilitators that enabled access by researchers. As a result, the role of research-based knowledge in the networks remained more in the academic realm. Co-innovation in the European projects involved reflexivity around the institutional change needed to support the aspired ecologically intensive technological change, which was less pronounced in the Uruguayan projects. In addition, the tools and learning cycle procedures in the EU projects appeared more thorough than those in the Latin American projects.