Co-design

The development of guiding principles in FInAL principally takes place in a co-design-process in which farmers and scientists are equally involved.

Co-design describes collaboration between scientists and praxis actors in a flexible and iterative process with feedback loops. The process and its sub-steps (e.g. participatory development of guiding principles and selection of measures) are a crucial factor of successfully working out practical solutions and transferable innovations. For future sustainable cultivation systems, a collaborative and strategic design for decision-making is necessary, that takes needs and values of farmers and other practitioners into account during. Further, it needs to give praxis actors the opportunity to make choices between different solutions and enable them to adapt to local conditions.

Farmers can no longer be seen as sole recipients of innovations. In addition to the goal of improving cultivation systems, other central aspects are social learning and strengthening of networks for empowerment of participants to get active themselves. Here, linking a de-novo- design that develops solutions beyond current systems (e.g. scientific modelling) to a step-by-step design (continuous improvement through feedback-loops) is regarded to be most suitable.

Current state of knowledge shows that matters of justice (trust, transfer of information, etc.) and the design of innovative processes play a crucial role for success of innovations. Inclusion of actors and participatory survey of problems as well as solutions is, among others, identified as promoting acceptance.

However, acceptance analyses in the context of research should not exclusively focus on identifying instruments that promote acceptance for broadly implementing innovations and making them transferable. From a research perspective, it is similarly important to account for the complex theoretical conception that acceptability is. This means including different stages of acceptance, process oriented and spatial levels, as well as the changeability of acceptance decisions.

Further, acceptance must not only be examined on basis of technical functional approaches, but rather has to regard socio-cultural (e.g. value systems), procedural, and actor-related aspects (including values, norms and preferences). Likewise, revealing so-called lock-in-effects or path dependencies is a crucial aspect of acceptance analyses.

Additionally, in the landscape-context it is important create feedback loops between results of acceptance studies and planning on landscape-level.