Abstract in English and French

For 25 years, the work of ILEIA and its AgriCultures Network partners has been shaped by the idea that millions of small-scale farmers and their supporters in society experiment and innovate during their daily work. In the local ecological setting farmers increase their technical and economic autonomy, raise productivity and incomes. The main objective of the Agricultures Network is to make these innovations visible as examples of an alternative model of development. The network allows sharing knowledge on common views vis-à-vis agro-ecological farming that exist across relevant (GO, NGO, research, education and private) organisations, in which everybody can play a constructive role. This paper gives a few examples of the results achieved in terms of information exchange and knowledge building. During field visits we always observe how farmers and practitioners actively contribute to the “body of knowledge” on sustainable agriculture but rarely have the capacity to document or systematise, limiting the possibilities for dissemination and scaling up. This led us to develop a documentation capacity building programme, with which, by focusing, detailed descriptions and analysis, practitioners “unearth” a greater number of experiences, contribute to their analysis and wider dissemination, and in this way contribute to the field-based generation of knowledge on agroecology. Running this programme also helped us identify the challenges which all documentation processes face. We look forward to documenting not only field-based experiences, but also processes in the governance arena that sets conditions for small-scale farming to play its societal roles.

Text in English