Pathways to agrifood system transformation: from local innovation to policy change

The DeSIRA initiative is a portfolio of 80 research and innovation (R&I) projects run in over 65 countries across three continents between 2019 and 2026, supported by a European Union contribution of €340 million. DeSIRA aims to enhance the contribution of R&I in addressing complex issues relating to sustainability transitions and agrifood system (AFS) transformation, towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, in low- and middle-income countries. The DeSIRA initiative is a model-in-the making on how to provoke and accelerate AFS transformations toward sustainability through action-research in partnerships, multidimensional innovations, multi-actor and system approaches, within project-based approaches. “Food system transformations refer to significant re-configurations of the assemblage of food system activities, actors, outcomes, and relationships (dynamics) to move away from the current globalized industrial model and ensure sustainable, resilient, and just models of production and consumption. These transformative processes demand the collective and inclusive redesigning (from re-imagining to re-governing) of food system components through platforms where governance, practices, power, and value-change can be debated and enacted at multiple scales. Food system re-design should therefore be seen as an ethico-political process that needs to be collectively stewarded and nurtured in an adaptive, engaged, and creative way. This also means that strategies (pathways) and tools need to respond to and resonate with current contextual needs and features, while also being future-proof and proactive (anticipatory).” (Juri et al., 2024) The first book of Stories of Change from DeSIRA projects, Activating agricultural transitions to sustainability through participatory research and co-innovation, published in September 2024,2 illustrates how 12 DeSIRA projects co-developed strategies to enhance R&I in the specific contexts where they operate.

This second book further illustrates stories of innovation, with a view to narrate the contributions of the DeSIRA initiative to AFS transformation, and how DeSIRA projects created or reinforced changes that produced initial outcomes and thus built conditions for impact at scale with: • a focus on the nature and the transformative potential of changes provoked and the gaps filled by DeSIRA projects within agricultural innovation systems through the novelties that they brought; • a critical reflection on how, and by whom, the innovations were selected and bundled for addressing sustainability challenges, who ends up owning these innovations and who can help scaling them. 

The strategies developed by projects and the project setups discussed in the first book are part of these conditions and enablers. They combine: • engagement of researchers and research organisations with innovation stakeholders as a regular practice at all stages of an action-research initiative, coupled with continuous capacity development through actionlearning and reward systems that recognise open and responsible innovation and collaborative science; • openness to new organisational modalities that break silos, widen geographic coverage, intersect across scales, and produce systems change with transdisciplinary work, where the different perspectives of an innovation are baked into the collaboration from the start; • early attention to readiness for scaling and/or sustainability of their actions supported by monitoring and evaluation systems that privilege learning, evidence generation and support adaptive management to respond to context changes and inevitable readjustments from initial plans; • attention to markets, especially to market viability of the novelties developed or adapted with farmer communities, in close collaboration with farmer organisations; • investment in evidence generation and updating of knowledge systems in support of new types of AFS and sustainability transitions, with a view to facilitate decision making, open new options, disseminate successful proof of concepts; • engagement with policy actors through dialogues to enhance visioning, innovation prioritisation, decision making and co-design of scaling strategies, to adjust regulations to emerging technologies, to maximise environmental, financial, equity and social benefits from innovations nurtured by researchers and their partners. 

The collection of stories in this book will walk the reader through these enabling conditions and modalities that have helped producing innovations of different natures, often in combination, that call for different scaling approaches and modalities. The stories show how project teams have forged networks of collaboration with diverse actors and have woven outcome trajectories over longer periods than project duration in order to ensure continuity in the changes they have triggered.