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Impact of agriculture on environment and human health, energy crisis and climate change enjoin policy-makers and farmers to rethink the model of agricultural production. One way is to promote a strong ecologisation of agriculture reducing inputs using ecosystem services at field, farm and landscape level and new managements. Designing and implementating such agricultural model needs to deeply change the management of farming systems, natural resources and food–chain while dealing with a wide range of environmental and societal changes. To accompany this change agricultural actors and researchers require new tools. Based on the concept of ecological transition, the TATA-BOX project will propose a methodology and a set of methods and tools to help local agricultural stakeholders to develop a vision of the desirable transition of local agricultural systems and to steer it. As part of the adaptive and transition management paradigms, the project will propose an epistemological move to better match current needs of participatory research (hybridization between hard and soft sciences). The case-study will be the Tarn river watershed where water and biodiversity resources are at stake and where some collective dynamics toward agroecology have already started.

In this chapter we present very briefly the main framework used to establish the TATA-BOX project and the general methodology developed to codesign the territorial agroecological transition.

Analyses of transition towards a more sustainable agriculture often identify two different pathways that can be linked to either strong or weak sustainability. In this interdisciplinary work, we aim at overcoming this narrow choice between these two alternatives, by offering a socio-agronomic characterisation of multiple agriculture models that currently coexist in Western economies. We use an agronomic typology of farming systems based on the role of exogenous inputs and endogenous ecosystem services in agricultural production, and on the degree of embeddedness of farming systems within local/global food systems. This typology identifies six agriculture models that we analyse in socio-economic terms. We then clarify the structuring principles that organise these models, and the social values underpinning their justification. This analysis enables us to discuss the efficiency conditions of political instruments.

In agroecological approaches, autonomy emerges as a central concept. It is also meaningful for farmers, for whom implementing the agroecological transition of livestock farming systems (LFS) requires greater autonomy with respect to inputs and the dominant socio-economic and technical regime. How does this concept of autonomy encompass the complexity of the agroecological transition? This chapter provides an answer through an overview of the various approaches used to analyse the autonomy of LFS, as well as a conceptual framework that can serve to comprehensively examine it. Three approaches to LFSs’ autonomy are presented, based on whether they are focused on the flows of material between system components, on the functioning and management of the system, or on the socio-economic organisation and the values underpinning it. Each of these addresses autonomy in its biotechnical or decisional dimension, as well as in terms of three analysis components: embeddedness, dependency, and footprint. The conceptual framework inter-relates these two dimensions and three components, thus providing an integrated approach to LFSs’ autonomy. Its application to two case studies, one on the farm level and the other on the farm and territorial levels, demonstrates its relevance to design and implement the agroecological transition of LFSs.

Agroecological transition corresponds to a systemic transformation consisting in the ecologisation of agriculture and food. It concerns multiple stakeholders (farmers, supply chains, natural resource managers, etc.) and is characterised by a deliberate political intention to bring about change. This chapter highlights a set of determinants of agroecological transition at play in transforming the techniques and the values underpinning both agricultural production and food consumption choices – both of which can lead to various new agri-food systems. Based on the literature on transition studies, we focus on several considerations that could help stakeholders to better engage in such a process: (i) transition takes place over time intervals that vary, depending on the analysis scale (the farm or the agri-food system as a whole); (ii) transition is complex, systemic and requires changes of the whole sociotechnical regime; (iii) transition implies strong connections between niche-innovations and the dominant sociotechnical regime; and (iv) changes in values and individuals’ abilities are fundamental drivers. Hence, by focusing on the plurality of factors and stakeholders at work, we unpack the complexity of this transition, and in this way help the stakeholders to design and execute it. To conclude, we examine specific issues around the governance of agroecological transition.

The concept of agroecological transition revives debates on how to deal with complexity and uncertainty. While the adaptive approach and its “adjust along the way” principle have been adopted as a relevant general framework to deal with partially irreducible uncertainty, the different approaches to the definition and management of uncertainty are rarely explicitated. In this chapter we highlight the diversity of these stances through brief presentations of research work that is related to agroecology and sustainable development, and anchored in various disciplines (modelling, management sciences, economics, ecology). This gives us a first glimpse of the variety of concepts used to describe uncertainty, characterising nature and the different approaches to manage it. It shows also that these definitions of uncertainties, clearly derived from particular disciplines or school of thought, can be applied together in a more or less complementary way. Finally, we discuss how this explicitation of the diversity of approaches to uncertainty contributes to highlighting different ways of defining the agroecological transition itself – especially between determinist or more open-ended approaches–, and identifies interdisciplinary research issues.

This chapter aims to further our understanding of the governance mechanisms that might best support a territorialised agroecological transition (TAET). The challenge of governance is to coordinate the actions of a multitude of actors and to integrate different dimensions of agroecology. This challenge is portrayed as important in the sustainable agri-food systems literature, which seeks a convergence of governance approaches pertaining to either a Socio-Ecological Systems (SES) or a Socio-Technical Systems (STS)-oriented conception. Starting from a representation of the territory that combines these two approaches, we emphasize the importance of reflexive governance for collectively constructing a shared space of values and knowledge between actors. Case studies of eco-innovative food and energy projects in rural areas of Gers and Aveyron in France illustrate various governance mechanisms. Even if there are high expectations pertaining to the territory as a place for articulating public, market, and civil society actors around a shared vision of sustainable agri-food systems, there is still a long way to go before local governance of the transition becomes a reality, including from a long-term perspective.

For farmers, the transition towards agroecology implies redesigning both their production system and their commercialisation system. To engage in this type of transition, they need to develop new knowledge on practices adapted to local conditions, which will involve new actors in their network. This chapter explores the role of actors’ networks in the agroecological transition of farmers, with a particular focus on farming practices and modes of commercialisation. We held semi-structured interviews to understand: (i) individual farmers’ trajectories of change, considering practices at the farm and food system levels; (ii) the role of farmers’ networks in their involvement in the agroecological transition; and (iii) the role of their networks on a broader scale. In the Tarn-Aveyron basin, we interviewed ten dairy farmers and 50 actors interacting with them in connection with their farming practices. We focus on two dairy farmers’ trajectories: one who took a path towards agroecology, and the other who did not. We then show that the role of actors’ network is crucial in facilitating or impeding the agroecological transition. We highlight the importance of considering actors’ networks as a whole, including in the commercial sector, as having a key role in farmers’ shift towards agroecological transition.

The purpose of the TATA-BOX project was to develop a toolbox to support local stakeholders in the design of an agroecological transition at local level. A participatory process based on existing conceptual and methodological frameworks was developed for the design of new configurations of stakeholders and resource systems in the farming systems, supply-chains and natural resources management that were to form a new agroecological territorial system. This process, presented here, was adapted and tested on two adjacent territories in south-western France. It was structured around three main stakeholders’ workshops to support the holistic diagnosis, the design of a normative vision, and the backcasting approach of the transition pathway. We describe the participatory methods and the multimodal intermediary tools used to support the collective design of the agroecological transition. We also present the main turnkey outcomes of the design process for local stakeholders, including shared diagnosis, vision for an agroecological territorial system in 2025, and a projected action plan for transition from the initial to the desired agriculture and associated governance structures. Finally, we discuss the limits of the process and the conditions that would enable stakeholders to implement the transition, by reducing remaining uncertainties.

This chapter describes how we supported the project leaders of TATA-BOX in their task of designing a management system for the project. We did so by fuelling their reflectivity: rather than making suggestions on how to manage the project – in a normative approach –, we analysed the on-going project management and mirrored what had been done after a year. The TATA-BOX project leaders would thus be able to decide how to adjust their management and to carry on – in a reflective approach. We report on this process in this chapter: after giving some theoretical background on the concept of reflectivity and its role in helping the project leaders to manage TATA-BOX, we describe: (1) how we worked with them over 6 months, 1 year after the project began, and (2) the different methods we used to meet the project leaders’ expectations. We then discuss the efficiency of these methods, their effects on the management of the project, and some lessons learned for the management of such research projects generally.