SHARING AGRO-ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND STRENGTHENING SOCIAL NETWORKS: THE AGRICULTURES NETWORK DOCUMENTING FIELD-BASED INNOVATION EXPERIENCES FOR RECOGNITION OF FAMILY FARMING

Frank van Schoubroeck (1) , Jorge Chavez-Tafur (2) , Paulo Petersen (3)

1 Chercheur indépendant
2 ILEIA - Centre for Research and Information on Low External Input and Sustainable Agriculture
3 AS-PTA - Assessoria Serviços e Projetos em Agricultura Alternativa

For 25 years, the work of ILEIA and its AgriCultures Network partners has been shaped by the idea that millions of small-scale farmers and their supporters in society experiment and innovate during their daily work. In the local ecological setting farmers increase their technical and economic autonomy, raise productivity and incomes. The main objective of the Agricultures Network is to make these innovations visible as examples of an alternative model of development. The network allows sharing knowledge on common views vis-à-vis agro-ecological farming that exist across relevant (GO, NGO, research, education and private) organisations, in which everybody can play a constructive role. This paper gives a few examples of the results achieved in terms of information exchange and knowledge building. During field visits we always observe how farmers and practitioners actively contribute to the “body of knowledge” on sustainable agriculture but rarely have the capacity to document or systematise, limiting the possibilities for dissemination and scaling up. This led us to develop a documentation capacity building programme, with which, by focusing, detailed descriptions and analysis, practitioners “unearth” a greater number of experiences, contribute to their analysis and wider dissemination, and in this way contribute to the field-based generation of knowledge on agro-ecology. Running this programme also helped us identify the challenges which all documentation processes face. We look forward to documenting not only field-based experiences, but also processes in the governance arena that sets conditions for small-scale farming to play its societal roles.

Mots clés: small-scale family farming; documentation; systematisation; innovation; information exchange; institutional development

Domaines: Agriculture, économie et politique

Frank van Schoubroeck, Jorge Chavez-Tafur, Paulo Petersen. SHARING AGRO-ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND STRENGTHENING SOCIAL NETWORKS: THE AGRICULTURES NETWORK DOCUMENTING FIELD-BASED INNOVATION EXPERIENCES FOR RECOGNITION OF FAMILY FARMING. ISDA 2010, Jun 2010, Montpellier, France. 9 p. ⟨hal-00523146⟩