Search

International audience; La théorie du changement consiste à mettre en œuvre concrètement le principe de coproduction des connaissances dans la conception de projets d’accompagnement des transitions socio-environnementales. Il s’agit de rendre explicites les différentes visions du changement et ses obstacles ou opportunités, et de co-construire une vision partagée, support d’un plan d’action commun. La théorie du changement transforme les connaissances en actions en tissant des liens entre acteurs, secteurs et échelles d’intervention. En s’affranchissant des cloisonnements, les solutions deviennent tangibles. Les changements à grande échelle peuvent alors se manifester en engageant les politiques et les décideurs à travers les réseaux locaux, nationaux et régionaux.

Créée en janvier 2021, l'UMR SENS est le fruit de la rencontre de trois collectifs du CIRAD de l'IRD et de l'UPVM autour de questions environnementales. Au sein du pôle Vie de l'unité, le groupe ClimSENS développe une réflexion collective sur l'empreinte environnementale des activités de recherche et la mobilisation des membres de l'UMR autour de bonnes pratiques. Pour ce faire, nous avons réalisé un bilan carbone pour les années 2019 et 2020 des membres des collectifs qui composent l'UMR. Le bilan carbone est considéré comme une base objective de discussion permettant d'analyser les marges de manoeuvre et de mettre en place un dispositif de suivi et d'évaluation d'initiatives concrètes qui seront mises en place. Afin d'aborder la diversité des points de vue des membres de l'UMR SENS face aux enjeux environnementaux, nous avons mené une série d'entretiens sur les pratiques de recherche, en nous intéressant aux relations entre pratiques professionnelles et privées, aux contraintes et aux opportunités pour les faire évoluer. Ensuite, trois ateliers participatifs ont été organisés pour mettre en discussion les résultats des bilans carbone et de l'analyse des entretiens et pour formuler des propositions d'engagements pour le collectif SENS.

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.

The Eco-Friendly Intensification and Climate-resilient Agricultural Systems (EFICAS) project was an action-research project jointly implemented by CIRAD (Centre de coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement) and DALaM (Department of Agricultural Land Management under Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR) and co-funded by The French Development Agency (AFD) and the European Union (EU) from 2014 to 2019.The EFICAS project aimed to engage farming communities into the participatory design of agro-ecological alternatives for sustainable agricultural intensification in the mountainous provinces of northern Laos. Over the past 5 years, the project has been working on how to translate the participatory land use planning (PLUP) into action plans and notably into Community-based Agricultural Development Plans (CADPs) which is an adaptive learning process.This manual - from the EFICAS Know-How Series - aims to provide to field practitioners basic information and tips on how successfully plan, implement, and monitor a CADP.

World Congress on Agroforestry, Montpellier, FRA, 20-/05/2019 - 22/05/2019; Landscape performance assessment is key for a constant and sustainable development of landscapes. A session at the Global Land Programm (GLP) Open Science Meeting gathered state of the art methods and approaches. Key lessons are brought to Agroforestry landscapes

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 (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. Using a spatial land system model, we examined in three experiments in how far different factors contributed to the spatial pattern of the maize boom between 2000 and 2016 in Sayaboury Province, Laos. The factors tested included land productivity, farm gate price, travel time to trader companies, 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 geographic and economic factors was not sufficient to explain the spatial pattern of the crop boom. Interestingly though, increases in land productivity had the largest effect on model performance regarding the spatial extent of the maize boom. Thus, we conclude that the introduction of a series of techniques to increase agricultural productivity (i.e. hybrid maize cultivars, herbicides, mechanical tillage and sowing) were crucial for the boom to unfold. We outline implications of our findings for governance bodies that are faced with crop booms.

In the northern uplands of Laos, landscape mosaics and people livelihoods rely on complex interactions, preventing the straightforward adoption of sustainable land management techniques despite their demonstrated performances as compared to (i) swidden systems with shortening fallow periods or (ii) monocropping systems based on the use of chemical inputs and/or mechanical tillage. To facilitate the dissemination of agroecology innovations in remote upland villages, the Eco-Friendly Intensification and Climate resilient Agricultural Systems (EFICAS) project is engaging with village communities into landscape level transformations of agricultural production and resource management. Since 2014, the project staff works closely with local communities on a theory of change process that promotes agroecology practices such as conservation agriculture, agroforestry, system of rice intensification, or integrated farming. Local stakeholders envision their desirable village landscape through participatory land use planning and then engage into successive learning loops to co-produce their own development pathways towards the collectively agreed land use plan. An impact monitoring systems has been setup since the beginning of the project to demonstrate the effectiveness of transformative landscape approaches on achieving sustainable development goals, including climate change mitigation and adaptation. We selected twelve pairs of similar villages covering the large diversity of agroecological and socioeconomic contexts found in the study region. Interventions were organized in one village of each pair while the other village was used as control. We co-produced the monitoring indicators with local communities to make sure they were meaningful to them and actionable to adjust the interventions all along the transformative process. The participatory monitoring system consisted in three successive rounds of data collection organized in 2014 (baseline), 2016 and 2018 in both intervention and control villages. We co-designed and then used the EFICAS role-play game to explore with farmers scenarios of changes and monitor social learning along the transformative pathway.

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.

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.

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.

The multifunctional landscapes of the Lao uplands are characterized both by their diversity of species, land uses and livelihood strategies and, increasingly, the rapid expansion of cash cropping, large-scale land investments and infrastructural developments. Upland communities are faced with unprecedented challenges as they seek to negotiate dynamic processes of change. We present key information on the current status of these changes—examining livelihood transitions and structural dynamics rooted in national policy frameworks—and propose alterative development pathways that build on, rather than replace, traditional systems of knowledge, practice, and the interconnectedness between human communities and their landscapes. In this series of presentations, we focus on: (1) Adding values to upland agriculture, proposing an inclusive vision and roadmap for sustainable upland development; (2) exploration of vulnerabilities and the adaptive capacity of upland communities in the face of change; (3) the elaboration of two sets of alternative futures, focusing on multifunctional approaches as a preferred alternative to mono-functional land systems and (4) present the current state of knowledge on landscape-based approaches for leveraging the development potential of upland agrobiodiversity and multifunctionality.