In addition to communications by members of different scientific communities, the organisers wished to create a space for discussion based on feedback from different agroecology practitioners, facilitators, teachers and activists.

Daniel López García, Instituto de Economía, Geografía y Demografía (IEGD), Madrid, Spain, Claire Lamine and Danièle Magda (INRAE) were organising two sessions on “Agroecological transitions as open ended processes: participatory research at the territorial scale”. In this session we aimed to generate debate around the diverse pathways of Agroecological Transitions in regard to deterministic versus open-ended perspectives, based on empirical analyses of territorialised (and therefore multi-actor) transition processes. One of the main questions was how participatory action-research and activist research contribute (or not) to an open-endeness of the AET processes towards agroecology scaling?

These include two ATTER collective papers with colleagues from France and Brazil and based on different ATTER case studies (download presentations below). The following debates were very lively and interesting. The introduction of the question of the plurality of visions of ecologisation and of their role for the transition process was taken up by participants as an interesting reflexion their own work, particularly when seeking to develop participatory approaches. Following that point a transversal discussion has emerged on the living lab putting in regard different experiences and approaches in countries as for example Canada and Spain.