Designing participatory territorial projects through a research-education-action platform: four experiences on periurban agriculture and local food production
Abstract
Designing a participatory territorial project is a complex issue: involving the actors concerned requires in fact to deal with different scales of action and coordinating the local initiatives with existing wide-level policies [1]. As researchers in landscape agronomy and spatial planning, we are interested in developing methodologies to facilitate such a process [2]. We argue that the collaborative learning approach ‘research-education-action platform’ can be a reliable option to support problem-solving and to foster innovations in complex systems [3]. This approach is a participatory action science that aims to provide concepts, methods and tools to include the territorial dimension in land management and territorial development research. Five competencies are needed: (i) interdisciplinarity, (ii) connection to the field, to involve actors and make synergies, (iii) ability to articulate different spatiotemporal levels, (iv) adaptation, to offer generic methods that preserve specificities and (v) reflexivity, to step back the productions and produce knowledge for action.