OBJECTIVE: We propose a conceptual framework on agency and behavior change for transforming agri-food systems (ACT framework). ACT emphasizes agri-food system actors' behaviors with attention to their power, agency, and the influence of structural agri-food system elements. Researchers can apply ACT to assess an initiative's contributions to changes in system elements through individual and collective behaviors. METHODS: We conducted literature reviews and key informant interviews for 29 initiative case studies. Using ACT, we identified patterns in terms of initiatives' targeted actors, behaviors, and the factors shaping actors' agency and behavior. We then applied ACT in an initiative in Zimbabwe to develop a theory of change that links behavior change pathways with broader systems transformation. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The reviewed initiatives focused heavily on shaping producers' behavior through knowledge transfer, less often considering other actors and structural challenges and opportunities. Key informants frequently reported enablers and impediments to achieve initiative outcomes that were associated with structural system elements. Few were able to articulate their initiative's theory of change and underlying assumptions. SIGNIFICANCE: ACT can support a more diverse and theory-based exploration of agri-food system initiatives' target actors, behaviors, and factors shaping behaviors. Development professionals can apply the ACT framework to design more effective TOCs that attend to diverse actor groups and leverage the factors influencing these actors' agency and behaviors.

Cet article montre les apports de la sociologie de la transaction sociale dans une recherche participative pour l’aménagement du territoire en Tunisie. Dans le cadre d’un programme de développement rural, trois scènes transactionnelles sont analysées : la politique, la recherche et le terrain. La sociologie de la transaction sociale permet : 1/ de prendre en compte les différentes échelles transactionnelles dans la compréhension des échanges et des débouchés de la démarche participative ; 2/ d’éclairer les oppositions entre acteurs. L’article propose trois manières pour les chercheurs et facilitateurs d’accompagner les acteurs locaux dans les transitions économiques, sociales et environnementales : en prenant en compte 1/ les émotions, 2/ le rôle de l’espace et du temps dans les démarches participatives et 3/ en favorisant l’élargissement de l’espace des transactions sociales, en estompant la rigidité des institutions et des dispositifs.

Semiarid Tunisia is characterized by agricultural production that is delimited by water availability and degraded soil. This situation is exacerbated by human pressure and the negative effects of climate change. To improve the knowledge of long-term (1980 to 2020) drivers for Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) changes, we investigated the semiarid Rihana region in central Tunisia. A new approach involving Google Earth Engine (GEE) was used to map LULC using Landsat imagery and vegetative indices (NDVI, MSAVI, and EVI) by applying a Random Forest (RF) classifier. A Rapid Participatory Systemic Diagnosis (RPSD) was used to consider the relation between LULC changes and their key drivers. The methodology relied on interviews with the local population and experts. Focus groups were conducted with practicians of the Regueb Agricultural Extension Services, followed by semi-structured interviews with 52 households. Results showed the following: (1) the RF classifier in Google Earth Engine had strong performance across diverse Landsat image types resulting in overall classification accuracy of ≥0.96 and a kappa coefficient ≥0.93; (2) rainfed olive land increased four times during the study period while irrigated agriculture increased substantially during the last decade; rangeland and rainfed annual crops decreased by 58 and 88%, respectively, between 1980 and 2021; (3) drivers of LULC changes are predominately local in nature, including topography, local climate, hydrology, strategies of household, effects of the 2010 revolution, associated increasing demand for natural resources, agricultural policy, population growth, high cost of agricultural input, and economic opportunities. To summarize, changes in LULC in Rihana are an adaptive response to these various factors. The findings are important to better understand ways towards sustainable management of natural resources in arid and semiarid regions as well as efficient methods to study these processes.

In this paper, we use conceptual insights from the actor–network theory (ANT) to explore the role of agroecological innovation systems (AeISs) in the reconfiguration of agricultural practices toward sustainability. AeISs are actor networks involving a diversity of individuals (e.g., farmers, traders, experts) and organizations (e.g., cooperatives, rural development agencies, teaching and research institutions) that mainstream agroecology principles and practices to enhance agroecosystems’ resilience. Their composition and structure affect the way different agents of change interact, as well as how they access, exchange, and use knowledge as they drive the adoption of specific technologies. We document seven AeISs that were active between 2005 and 2020 in the northern uplands of Laos. Within the framework of these initiatives, action research was conducted for understanding the processes underpinning diverse technical, organizational, and institutional innovations to foster an agroecological transition. Building on a comparative analysis of AeIS, we consider how agency was distributed among collectives as they reorganized in time. Our discussion highlights the importance of configuring, enlarging, and nurturing spaces in which actors are empowered to adjust and adapt, as well as to think and act collectively in complexity. Lastly, what counts in the innovation is the underlying networking process itself, i.e., the process through which all actors of the AeIS interact and exchange. Changes in the networking processes come with a changing conception of knowledge. Moving from knowledge to knowing (i.e., knowledge in the making), AeISs no longer only promote products or technologies, but also collective intelligence based on an ethic of care.

Advisory services have long been considered key instruments to improve farm and crop management by introducing innovative practices and technologies in agricultural systems. Departing from a simple "technology transfer" perspective, participatory approaches were developed over the 1980s to enhance the design and adoption of innovations. Farmer field schools (FFS), an advisory service strongly based on participatory principles, aimed at supporting and fostering farmers' innovation. FFS have been used and adapted since the 1980s to meet context-specific needs in crop or farm management and foster integrative approaches. In this study, we report on interviews with some FFS project leaders and we assess the effective participation in a specific FFS experiment in central Tunisia. We show that, despite numerous studies reporting on FFS experiments, there are generally no available records on how participatory approaches were applied and on the extent of stakeholders' involvement. We contend that evaluating stakeholders' participation level via an assessment of the FFS application process becomes a must to improve their quality and effectiveness. Our results show that there is a gap in applying FFS operationally. Thus, planned activities will not be adapted to local scope specifications. Therefore, they are not easily adopted and are even more rejected by farmers. In conclusion, we suggest introducing new tools (e.g., role-playing games) to create an interactive environment for discussions between stakeholders and to enhance the capacity of local farmers to contribute to the design of FFS experiments according to their needs.

More and more literature and practice recommend involving the public at the early stages of the policy cycle, i.e. issue identification, definition of the policy objectives and policy design. Policy design involves, among others, identifying solutions, ideas or alternatives which may address the policy objectives. Three main arguments are often put forward to advocate for the involvement of stakeholders, or the public, in policy design: a "user-centered" argument (i.e. for the policy to better meet people's priorities), an innovation argument (i.e. to conceive new solutions) and a collective argument (i.e. to identify collective actions and better tackle environmental problems). However, in both research and practice these arguments have been challenged. Research has insufficiently generated evidence of the influence of large-scale participation in policy design on resulting proposed actions. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether a large-scale participatory process leads to action proposals that fit people's priorities and that are innovative and collective. It draws from a land management and rural development policy design experiment conducted in six vulnerable areas of Tunisia. 4,300 direct participants were involved and 11,583 action proposals were collected. Our results highlight the influence of the local circumstances on innovation and the interest towards collective actions. Our results also show that whether policy design is made individually or in group influences the outcomes. The results also suggest that appropriate facilitation can help fostering more collective and innovative actions. We conclude the paper by opening up the idea of hybridizing policy design methods with methods from political and agricultural sciences in order to better understand the drivers and rationalities behind participants' action proposals.

Different intervention mechanisms are proposed to transform agricultural landscapes so that they fulfill multiple functions, compatible with sustainable development goals. In the case of climate change mitigation and adaptation, support policies and direct payments to affected populations are promoted as part of REDD+ initiatives. These interventions attempt to balance the provision of multiple ecosystem services with the maintenance or improvement of local livelihoods. In this paper, we explore the role that participatory evaluation can play in the implementation of payments for ecosystem services in rural communities in Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam and China. Engaged in a process of rapid integration into the market economy, these communities have been transforming their traditional Slash-and-burn systems in recent years and followed different paths of agricultural intensification. The positive or negative assessment of these developments is necessarily subject to value judgements in the choices made between different options. Ecosystem services allow for the comparison of landscape trajectories. Village communities explored scenarios for the evolution of their local agriculture, negotiated trade-offs between ecosystem services and identified potential "winners" and "losers". These simulations showed the importance of the timing of REDD+ programs in relation to ongoing agrarian transformations. They point to the risk of moving away from the initial ambitions related to the carbon ecosystem service to become an additional instrument for sustainable development.

Les facilitateurs territoriaux ont généralement pour mission de faciliter le dialogue entre différents types d’acteurs (agriculteurs, élus, administration…) en vue du développement d’un territoire. Cet article décrit un dispositif pilote qui a formé et accompagné des agents de l’administration agricole tunisienne, chargés d’appui au développement rural, dans l’apprentissage et la mise en œuvre de leur nouveau métier en vue d’une planification territoriale concertée dans six zones rurales tunisiennes.

Mountain regions of the humid tropics are characterized by steep slopes and heavy rains. These regions are thus prone to both high surface runoff and soil erosion. In Southeast Asia, uplands are also subject to rapid land‐use change, predominantly as a result of increased population pressure and market forces. Since 1998, the Houay Pano site, located in northern Lao PDR (19.85°N 102.17°E) within the Mekong basin, aims at assessing the long‐term impact of the conversion of traditional slash‐and‐burn cultivation systems to commercial perennial monocultures such as teak tree plantations, on the catchment hydrological response and sediment yield. The instrumented site monitors hydro‐meteorological and soil loss parameters at both microplot (1 m 2 ) and small catchment (0.6 km 2 ) scales. The monitored catchment is part of the network of critical zone observatories named Multiscale TROPIcal CatchmentS (M‐TROPICS). The data shared by M‐TROPICS in Houay Pano are (1) rainfall, (2) air temperature, air relative humidity, wind speed, and global radiation, (3) catchment land use, (4) stream water level, suspended particulate matter, bed particulate matter and stones, (5) soil surface features, and (6) soil surface runoff and soil detachment. The dataset has already been used to interpret suspended particulate matter and bed particulate matter sources and dynamics, to assess the impact of land‐use change on catchment hydrology, soil erosion, and sediment yields, to understand bacteria fate and weed seed transport across the catchment, and to build catchment‐scale models focused on hydrology and water quality issues. The dataset may be further used to, for example, assess the role of headwater catchments in large tropical river basin hydrology, support the interpretation of new variables measured in the catchment (e.g., contaminants other than faecal bacteria), and assess the relative impacts of both climate and land‐use change on the catchment.

Différents mécanismes d’intervention sont proposés pour transformer les paysages agricoles de manière à ce qu’ils remplissent de multiples fonctions, compatibles avec les objectifs du développement durable. Dans le cas de l’atténuation et de l’adaptation au changement climatique, des politiques incitatives et des mécanismes de rémunération des acteurs locaux sont promues dans le cadre des initiatives REDD+. Sur le terrain, ces interventions visent à assurer simultanément la fourniture de services écosystémiques et le maintien, voire l’amélioration, des moyens d’existence locaux. Dans cet article, nous explorons le rôle que peut jouer l’évaluation participative dans la mise en œuvre de paiements pour services environnementaux au sein de communautés rurales d’Indonésie, du Laos, du Vietnam et de Chine. Engagées dans un processus d’intégration rapide à l’économie de marché, ces communautés ont transformé leurs systèmes d’abattis-brûlis traditionnels pour s’orienter vers différentes voies d’intensification agricole au cours des dernières années. L’évaluation positive ou négative de ces évolutions fait nécessairement l’objet de jugements de valeur dans les choix effectués entre différentes options possibles. La formulation de ces options en termes de services écosystémiques rendus permet de comparer les trajectoires paysagères et leur impact sur les conditions de vie locales. Sur ces bases, les communautés peuvent explorer des scénarios de transformation de leurs pratiques agricoles, négocier des compromis entre services écosystémiques et identifier les « gagnants » et les « perdants » potentiels. Ces simulations ont montré l’importance du calendrier de mise en place des programmes REDD+ par rapport aux transformations agraires en cours. Elles pointent le risque de s’éloigner des ambitions initiales d’un impact sur les émissions de carbone pour devenir un instrument supplémentaire de développement durable.

En Tunisie, des politiques récentes cherchent à mettre en place une participation effective des populations rurales à la formulation de plans territoriaux de développement intégrant des dimensions économiques, sociales et environnementales. Le programme PACTE expérimente une démarche pilote pour mettre en œuvre cette participation dans six zones rurales, grâce à la constitution de comités de territoire. Pour préparer le travail de chaque comité, des habitants ont participé à la réalisation d’un diagnostic de leur territoire pour identifier les principaux enjeux de développement. Ensuite, ils ont formulé des propositions d’action pour répondre à ces enjeux, verbalement lors d’ateliers et, en dehors des ateliers, en utilisant des fiches mises à leur disposition puis collectées. L’article analyse les actions proposées par des habitants d’une zone d’intervention située dans le gouvernorat du Kef. L’analyse porte sur : i) les finalités de ces actions, à savoir dans quelle mesure ces actions répondent aux enjeux identifiés ; et 2) les caractéristiques de ces actions, notamment leur dimension individuelle ou collective et leur degré d’innovation. L’analyse est basée sur les comptes rendus des ateliers, les fiches de propositions d’actions collectées, et des entretiens auprès de membres d’institutions publiques de développement. Les actions proposées par les habitants couvrent l’essentiel des enjeux identifiés au cours des ateliers. Parmi les fiches remplies, ces habitants donnent la priorité à des actions individuelles et génératrices de revenu et, en particulier, à des activités qu’ils pratiquent déjà. Lors des ateliers, les participants ont envisagé des actions plus diverses, parfois innovantes, et plus souvent de nature collective. L’analyse proposée ici a permis d’identifier des opportunités pour la production de connaissances communes entre les futurs membres des comités de territoire, et entre eux et les membres des institutions publiques de développement. Le projet PACTE constitue une expérience innovante de mise en œuvre d’une démarche participative à grande échelle pour le diagnostic territorial et la formulation de proposition d’action en zone rurale au Maghreb. La réflexion sur les méthodes et moyens à utiliser pour permettre cette participation est un chantier sur lequel il sera important de continuer à avancer dans les années à venir.

De plus en plus d’initiatives de développement rural au Maghreb affichent une volonté d’adopter des approches participatives. Or, pour les agents de l’administration, la mise en œuvre de ces approches implique souvent un changement de posture et l’acquisition de connaissances et de compétences spécifiques. Comme tous les agents ne peuvent pas être formés à la participation, bon nombre d’initiatives adoptent une stratégie reposant sur une hypothèse de partage de compétences et de posture entre un petit groupe d’agents de l’administration qui sont formés à la participation et leurs collègues. Cet article vise à analyser dans quelle mesure ce partage de compétences et de posture est effectif ou non dans le cas d’une démarche participative mise en œuvre sur un territoire rural en Tunisie. Notre analyse repose sur 12 entretiens individuels réalisés auprès d’agents de l’administration. Notre analyse montre qu’il y a eu un partage partiel entre les facilitateurs de la démarche et les agents de l’administration qui ont été impliqués. Les personnes interrogées ont notamment acquis des compétences sur les outils participatifs et pour l’une d’entre elles au moins un changement de posture est envisagé. On ne peut pas dire pour autant que leur implication dans la démarche, quel que soit son degré, ait changé leur vision sur la participation. Le partage de compétences et de posture pourrait être renforcé par une réflexion plus poussée sur la distribution des rôles et des responsabilités entre agents de l’administration lors de l’ingénierie de la démarche.

Land use and land cover have rapidly changed in Kham basin, northern Laos, with a rapid expansion of maize cultivated area. While maize monoculture has contributed to reduce rural poverty, many farmers are now confronted to declining yields, indebtedness, rising health and environmental concerns. Interventions at two different stages of the maize boom, i.e. expansion-intensification and distress-diversification phases, allowed capturing the main drivers of change in maize production systems, and assessing opportunities and constraints for the adoption of more sustainable maize-legume mixed systems. The successive innovations in maize cropping systems, i.e. introduction of hybrid seeds, motorized tillage, herbicides, service provision, planters, and mineral fertilizers, were mainly driven by productivity and profitability objectives. Farmers' interest in maize-legume mixed systems was low during maize expansion-intensification phase. The decline in maize profitability and new market outlets for legumes open new opportunity windows for maize-legume mixed systems. Yet, farmers' adoption of such systems is limited by (i) local perceptions of legumes as cash crops only, and (ii) farmers' least effort strategies that includes e.g. heavy herbicide use and livestock free roaming after maize harvest. Large-scale adoption of maize-legume mixed systems requires innovative intervention mechanisms to engage local stakeholders into redesigning their landscapes and value-chains.

At the end of the 1990s, the Northwestern uplands of Cambodia were one of the last forest frontiers of the country. In a region that was the last Khmer Rouge stronghold, the opening of former conflict zones after a peace agreement initiated a vast movement of agricultural colonization. This movement was economically triggered by high market demand for agricultural commodities such as maize and cassava and fueled by a massive flow of spontaneous in-migration of land-poor farmers from lowland regions around the entire country. Focused on four upland districts along a pioneer front of Northwestern Cambodia, we analyzed historical trajectories of land use/cover changes using a chronological series of Landsat data from 1976 to 2016. We identified key drivers of deforestation using demographic data and qualitative information from local actors and other relevant stake-holders. We found a 65 percent forest cover loss due to conversion by smallholders into agricultural land for maize and cassava cultivation over a period of 15 years. The underlying mechanisms of land use change were further investigated to understand the diversity of individual farm trajectories and decision-making processes in relation to land conversion. These elements of diagnosis are essential to engage farming communities in innovative land use systems and to develop sustainable alternatives to boom crops that have led to the current situation of land degradation and economic instability.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) is viewed as an effective way to mitigate climate change by compensating stewards of forested areas for minimizing forestland conversion and protecting forest services. Opportunity costs assess the cost of foregone opportunity when preserving the forest instead of investing in an alternative activity or resource use. This paper questions the calculation method of opportunity costs using averaged economic benefits and co-benefits of different land-use transitions. We propose a nested approach to land-use transitions at the interface between landscapes and livelihoods and assessing a wide range of potential socio-ecological costs and benefits. Combining household surveys and focus groups with participatory mapping, we applied the approach in villages of Laos, Vietnam and China positioned along a broad transition trajectory from subsistence shifting cultivation to intensive commercial agriculture. By looking beyond the economics of land use, we highlight important linkages between land-use changes and livelihood differentiation, vulnerability and inequalities. Our results show the importance of addressing the impacts of land-use transitions on a wide range of potential ecological and socioeconomic costs and benefits at multiple levels.

Agroecology is a promising way to synergize climate change mitigation and adaptation. It builds on the practices and knowledge of smallholder farmers to address food insecurity while reducing dependence on fossil fuels and avoiding land degradation. However, bringing agroecology to scale remains an important challenge when it comes to addressing the broader policy, social and economic contexts. Agroecology research and resulting evidence on what makes the application of agroecology principles successful are typically generated at small spatial scales. Policies instruments and intervention mechanisms that would create enabling conditions for local agroecological innovations on a large scale are still largely missing. We investigated the approaches, methods and resources employed by research-development stakeholders to promote agroecological practices in Southeast Asia. We considered two dimensions related to the modalities of intervention, namely (i) push-pull interventions and (ii) transition-conversion approaches. The first dimension refers to the distinction between push interventions – where financial, technical, material and/or organizational support is provided to targeted actors allowing them to modify their practices (e.g. subsidies and farm extension work) – and pull interventions that target the broader social and economic conditions in which actors make decisions in order to favour desired practices (e.g. sensitization and price premiums, regulations on agricultural practices e.g. restricted pesticide use). The second dimension refers to a practical opposition between approaches that promote a strict conversion from one set of practices to another seen as more desirable and approaches that allow (or even plan) for a transition between different practices. We illustrate these multiple dimensions of transformative adaptation through concrete examples related to conservation agriculture and organic farming in Laos and Cambodia.

Crop booms are phenomena of global environmental change that keep on occurring around the globe and frequently exploit or degrade the local socio-ecological resources (resulting in e.g. loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, indebtedness). While causal mechanisms were identified and summarized in several frameworks, the causal effects of the identified factors remained largely unknown. In this study, we set up a new application of a spatial land system model to examine the causes for the clustered spatial pattern of the maize boom between 2000 and 2016 in Sayaboury Province, Laos. The factors tested included market access (travel time to trader companies), land productivity and total net revenue (proxy for profitability), spatial differences in farm gate price of maize, slope, and soil types. While crop booms are commonly associated with high commodity prices and improved market accessibility, our simulation results suggested that the combination of the geographic and economic factors we tested partially contribute to explain the location and spatial extent of the maize boom, but a full explanation has not been found. Interestingly though, temporal dynamics, such as increases in land productivity and profitability had the largest effect on model performance regarding the size of the maize boom area (experiment 2). Productivity and profitability increased thanks to political economic support for the introduction of a series of techniques (i.e. hybrid maize cultivars, herbicides, mechanical tillage and sowing) that made maize mono-cropping disproportionally competitive over other land management. We outline implications of our findings for governance bodies that are faced with crop booms.