Author: Miranda García (AEIDL)
After two years without being held due to the pandemic, the 14th International Conference of European Society for Ecological Economics (ESEE) finally took place in Pisa from June 14 to 17. Four days with a total of 50 sessions focused on transformative actions to escape from the current unsustainable paths.
Multi-Actor Platforms (MAPs), Living Labs (LLs) and Communities of Practices (CoPs) are increasingly considered by innovation policies as drivers of transformative change. Indeed, the interaction between stakeholders is supposed to generate innovation, adapted to the needs of users and their context, and to promote inclusion.
During the event, a special session focused on the science-policy-society interface for resilient and sustainable rural development was celebrated. Here, participants had the opportunity to explore these participatory approaches in three different Horizon 2020 projects: MOVING, SHERPA and DESIRA.
The MOVING project had 5 presentations in the session: a general overview of its Community of Practice (its approach and its participatory tasks), as well as four additional presentations sharing the results from the application of this approach and participatory vulnerability analysis of land use systems in 4 of the 23 mountain reference regions of the project and their specific value chains:
- Transdanubian Mountains in Hungary: Agroecological knowledge value chain
- Slovak Carpathian Mountains: Bio-honey value chain
- Swiss Alps: Mountain grain value chain
- Central Apennines in Italy: Alto-Molise dairy value chain
For their part, DESIRA showcased the deployment of participatory scenario planning and LLs in the creation of future digital rural visions, while SHERPA shared insights on the foresight study carried out through the MAPs. The aim of the SHERPA’s study was to draw recommendations for future rural policies and contribute to the research agenda.