Plicy Brief: Systems thinking: an important competency for agroecology transition

Agroecology transition is increasingly acknowledged as a potential pathway to address the complex environmental and socio-economic challenges confronting our current agrifood systems. Agroecology is based on an integrated approach that simultaneously applies ecological and social concepts and principles to the design and management of food and agricultural systems. Translating these concepts and principles into place-specific solutions requires a clear understanding of the agricultural, socio-economic and cultural context of the region or local area. Because of this context specificity, innovations to foster agroecological transition require many different types of knowledge and creativity. Agroecology Living Labs are instruments to bring stakeholders with these different types of knowledge together to co-create innovations inspired by the principles of agroecology. However, to successfully manage these co-creation processes, particular skills and attitudes are needed. The combination of knowledge, skills and attitudes, we call competencies (Spencer and Spencer, 1993). In the ALL-Ready project, we identified, together with many stakeholder groups involved in agroecology transition, 5 core competencies that need to be represented in the agroecology Living Labs. Besides having a clear understanding of the concept of agroecology and competencies to translate agroecology principles into the field, also skills for managing co-creation processes in Living Labs and knowledge on agroecology research were perceived as important competencies. Systems thinking was picked out as a key competency.