Among the representatives of the network that made up our study, a significant emphasis was placed on bringing together actors from different backgrounds. The growing success of rural social movements, and particularly La Via Campesina, has been in part attributed to the ability to foster a diálogo de saberes (translated as ‘wisdom dialogues’ or roughly the equivalent of dialogue between ways of knowing) amongst different rural peoples. While these situated knowledges have emerged through their specific experiences with neoliberal capitalist development, they nonetheless share a broad political interest. Drawing from Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009, 2010), Martínez-Torres and Rosset (2014) argue that political struggles for food sovereignty and agroecology are based on ‘absences’ or subaltern knowledge systems that are marginalised by the monopoly of western, corporate and scientific knowledges. In struggles for social change, there are many equally valid ways of knowing the world and transformative learning provides a mechanism for these perspectives to come into dialogue, without one approach dominating another (Martínez-Torres and Rosset 2014). Bringing these together, social movements can produce important ‘emergences’ at different scales, which form the basis for solidarity, mutual understanding, collective learning and joint action.
In our European research, participants emphasized the importance of these dialogues across three dimensions: Amongst food producers with different positionnings and perspectives; Between food producers and other actors in the food system (especially food consumers); Between food producers and formal education and research institutions.
Amongst Food Producers
Because agroecology is based on a set of underlying ethics and principles which are flexible and not beholden to firm rules or certification, it lends itself to bringing farmers with diverse approaches and worldviews together in a diálogo de saberes. As Rupert Dunn, [a peasant farmer and baker from Wales], commented,
People often don’t want to join the club [i.e. any one static and closed system of production] because they feel that they’ve got to change something about themselves in order to do it. What I like about agroecology is that we don’t have to do that […] I think it incorporates diversity
The agroecology learning initiatives thus brought together different traditions of sustainable agriculture—including permaculture, biodynamics, and organic agriculture. In this way, agroecology functions as a ‘boundary object’ (i.e. information of different types used in different ways by different communities) which reflects commonly held values of autonomy, food sovereignty, localising food systems and collective knowledges (Anderson et al. 2014).
Many learning initiatives also stressed the importance of bringing together more experienced farmers with new entrants. In the Toekomstboeren program in the Netherlands, for example, an emphasis was put on bringing together an intergenerational network of agroecological producers, which often led to new opportunities for young people to enter farming both in terms of knowledge gained and gaining access to land and resources.
Because of the place-specificity of agroecology, participants argued that inter-place diálogo de saberes between people from different biophysical, cultural and political contexts can provide important opportunities for learning and innovation. For example, the importance of facilitating mobility within territories and between them (e.g. in inter-European and international exchanges) was repeatedly mentioned. As Dan Powell, [founder of the Landbase education project in England], stated:
You just can’t learn everything at one place no matter how diverse it is. So to go to different places is really important...in the same way we were discussing about different countries just comparing between different farms. In the same region you could see people doing different things because of their skill based on their position and situation.
Amongst food producers and other actors in the food system
Although much emphasis has been put on farmer knowledge—exchanged especially through farmer-to-farmer learning—examples and debates in EAKEN also suggest that there is a need to emphasize a diálogo de saberes between farmers and other actors in the food system, especially consumers. For example, URGENCI, the international network for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), emphasised the need to consider consumers as key subjects in agroecology and agroecology learning. In one example of their agroecological education work, Ugenci brought farmers and consumers together using theatre as a method to voice concerns, frustrations and dynamics of CSAs. Judith Hitchman, [President of URGENCI] described the potential of extending agroecology learning to work across the farmer-consumer divide, focusing particularly on political education, as a part of a process of building a wider social movement:
The 2 million people [producers and consumers] in URGENCI all have passive knowledge. The average producer feeds 40 families so you can work out from 2 million people how many producers that is. But the issue is that a great many people have non-political motivation – they find it’s very fresh, very high quality it’s organic, irrespective of whether it’s certified or not. The issue is to bring the political knowledge to grassroots to both producers and consumers – as I said a moment ago they have passive knowledge…What concerns me is how to politicise the cross-cutting grassroots level...
For Judith, the participation of consumers in the political dynamics of agroecology was a rich but largely untapped potential for advancing food system transformation.
Another important diálogo de saberes in the network was between farmers and people whose knowledge is being applied in the development of appropriate farm technologies, farm inputs, and market outlets. For example, two of the learning initiatives represented in our initial work reflected a focus on community-developed appropriate technology for production and processing on small scale agroecological farms. Participants discussed how farmer autonomy in agroecology may in many cases be best acheived through interdependence with other actors who share a commitment to food sovereignty. Together they can co-produce innovations that reduce dependency on commercial inputs such as seeds, nutrients or farm machinery. The French cooperative, L’Atelier Paysan, and the UK-based Farm Hack focus on creating on-line and in-person open source learning and innovation communities between small-scale farmers, employees, engineers, software developers and agricultural development organisations. Based on this work, L’Atelier Paysan has begun to articulate and promote the concept of technology sovereignty for farm autonomy, which provides a political framework for the learning (L’Atelier Paysan 2016). This issue is discussed in greater detail in the section on connecting political and practical learning, below.
Between farmers and mainstream research and education institutions
Another important diálogo de saberes in agroecology learning can be seen amongst farmers and instructors in the formal education system. Many interviewees attributed some importance to the role of universities and formal education in agroecology, especially given the resources and reach of well-established education institutions. Yet, most had mixed experiences and perspectives reflecting the limiting nature of the institutional and cultural context of formal education in Europe. Participants described, for example, how mainstream institutions were unwilling or incapable of providing training that reflects and includes both the political rootedness and the practitioner-led learning considered essential by social movements.
While some recognised that there were courses on offer within some of these institutions that could be of technical use to agroecological farmer, these were considered generally disconnected from the political and social aspects of the agroecological movement, which rarely took a whole agri-food system approach. For example, Joel Holmdahl, [agroecology educator from Norway] suggested that “We have an increasing number of […] university courses calling themselves agroecology actually lacking the social and political aspects of agriculture”.
A few interviewees mentioned that agroecology courses in universities are primarily aimed at a graduate level, and are often targeted towards agroecological professionals, or experts, rather than farmers. Elske Hageraats [a peasant farmer from the Netherlands], discussing a course on agroecology at Wageningen University, expressed her frustration with the separation of the science of agroecology from the lived experiences of farmers and social movements.
During the agroecology course, the professors were only looking at the science and I asked: “where is the movement?” and they responded: “yeah well we don’t really discuss that”. I said: “you should also give students the chance to see first-hand, to visit farms and touch the soil”. Someone then told me: “no, here in the university the students are trained to become researchers. If they want to become farmers, they can do that somewhere else”... It seems like most teachers don’t see the point of all these connections, or maybe the university doesn’t give them the opportunity to teach this. They just want a scientific output. They don’t understand the importance of the other two aspects. Students hadn’t heard about La Via Campesina, for example, which should definitely be part of it.
Where universities do engage with agroecology, however, interviewees were often critical of the minimal recognition given to farmer knowledge and of the perspectives of social movements, which tended to be viewed as mundane or biased. As Ana Gonzalez [a program coordinator from the Basque Country], from her organisation EHNE-Bizkaia, explained,
There is a tendency always to say social movements are so influenced by ideology that we normally accused them of being demagogic, but actually what we are trying to say that there is no knowledge in the world that is neutral or objective, and even the academy is based on certain values and principles that were decided by the elites who have decided that this is called academic knowledge.
Despite all these criticisms, however, some farmers’ organisations in the network still consider that working with academic institutions can produce mutually beneficial outcomes. Ana went on to describe a healthy collaboration with the University of the Basque Country to develop a Masters program called “from the farm to the world.” While it can be difficult to align the priorities and ways of knowing of universities and social movements, Ana viewed this as a process of negotiation leading to interesting outcomes based on a mutual commitment to self-transformation:
This is about how we are going to create a relationship. When we’ve finished an educational project […] neither the social movements nor the universities are the same, we have influenced each other
As Ana argues, however, given the current role of higher education in the accumulation of power in a monopoly of elite knowledge, the potential for social movement engagement with formal institutions must especially involve a transformation of the university itself.
This is about making the university itself more peasant, more rural...we witnessed that most knowledge and theoretical approaches taught in universities are either directly influenced or lobbied by companies. The content they teach does not question at all the principles on which our economy is based or does not have anything to do with the problems of grassroot communities.
As Ana implies, simply bringing people into dialogue may not be enough, especially if how the dialogue unfolds results in no real questioning of the ‘principles on which our economy is based’; some other mechanism or set of principles is needed to ensure one group doesn’t simply dominate, and that ‘on the ground’ realities are adequately represented.
Horizontal learning
The second pillar of a Transformative Agroecology Learning approach is Horizontal Learning. or ‘Horizontalism’ is a central concept within popular education, and involves ‘democratic communication on the same level and […the intention to move towards] non-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian creation rather than reaction’ (Sitrin 2006). In this sense, horizontalism can be contrasted to a ‘banking’ style of education where a teacher deposits expert knowledge into deficient students (Freire 1972). In accordance with this approach, many participants described their intention to recognise the ability of all people to think critically, act strategically, and contribute knowledge. As Jildou Friso [a small scale farmer from the Netherlands] summarised it, ‘you shouldn’t just be telling people things but leading by example’. Thus, transformative agroecology learning can be seen to position learners not as the object of teaching, but rather the subjects of their own process of learning, discovery and agency, as well as participants in the joint production of collective knowledge throughout their horizontal networks.
Three main aspects of horizontal learning which emerged as important for a transformative learning approach are: (i) strengthening learning experiences; (ii) building confidence and capacity; and (iii) challenging hierarchy through a prefigurative politics.
Strengthening learning experiences
Horizontal learning experiences were promoted by interviewees as producing more effective and durable learning outcomes than top-down knowledge transfer approaches to extension. These approaches often involve bringing the experiences of all learners into dialogue, avoiding single-direction forms of learning. Ashley Trill [a small scale farmer from the U.K.] described a similar dynamic in his experience of farmer-to-farmer learning at a Farm Hack event in the UK:
I’ve already learned basically more in the last two hours than I’ve learned in the last year of being alone weeding or whatever. Everyone here has something to say or a little gem of advice. Tiny little things that are so handy to know.
As with Ashley’s sense that all participants had ‘a little gem’ to contribute, interviewees drew specific attention to the ways in which horizontal approaches fostered trust, genuine engagement and sharing between participants (often farmer-to-farmer) in learner-controlled processes. Ramona Duminicioiu [an activist and organizer from Romania], also stressed the efforts made by her organisation, Eco Ruralis, to take a non-hierarchical approach,
…to avoid making peasants feel like they are taught. They have been told for centuries that they are a burden that they are stupid, that they need to be told by the suits from the cities. We are trying to put peasants in situations where they are directing learning experiences.
Similarly, Rupert Dunn [a peasant farmer and baker from Wales] highlighted the importance of farmer-to-farmer dynamics, describing the, “moral support from someone who is a farmer saying, okay try these things out. I’ve been through that”. In addition to the peership dynamics of horizontal learning environments, Rupert also remarked on the simple logic of these types of exchanges:
it’s the only way to have appropriate and tangible accurate knowledges useful for farmers and farms. All farmers test a lot of techniques and systems on their farm and it’s really important to be able to scale up all those initiatives and how to scale up is only by bringing people together to exchange it.
A horizontal approach recognises that farmers are more likely to believe and emulate a fellow farmer, than they are to learn production techniques from urban professionals. Due to its peer-to-peer format, the majority of our interviewees echoed Rupert’s endorsement of a horizontal agroecology learning approach as a way to validate perspectives routinely sidelined in mainstream learning approaches.
Building confidence and capacity
Horizontal learning environments also have the advantage of fostering confidence in participants, emphasising that everyone has experience and knowledge to contribute in any learning environment (i.e. as teachers), as discussed by Jildou Friso [a small scale farmer from the Netherlands]:
Something that’s really crucial to stimulate the process is to convince people what they know is relevant and that they hold the knowledge themselves.
Katalin Rethy [a program coordinator from Hungary] elaborated on this dynamic in her description of the importance of ‘training the trainers’. Such a method, she explained, is essential for scaling up agroecology:
the trainers that we started to work with four years ago are now capable of training new ones, so it’s really about generating local knowledge. We work in Budapest and some of the villages we work with are 150 km away so we are trying to do this knowledge transfer to have local people present in the communities who are employed through our projects to be able to have the knowledge themselves to spread.
Such confidence and capacity building, when embedded within a strategic program to scale up and scale out a learning program, can create a catalytic effect, where more learners become teachers and the process takes on a self-perpetuating momentum (Fakih et al. 2003; McCune and Sánchez 2019).
As Elske Hageraats [a small scale farmer from the Netherlands], pointed out that top-down training or ‘big conferences’ where ‘everyone just presents and then just goes home’ can come with a certain ‘coldness’; by contrast, horizontal learning environments were consistently presented in terms of the personal connections and emotional processes they initiated, rather than only the instrumental and technical ‘outputs’:
the [agroecology] movement is about the feeling, not just the sharing. It is something more, something very deep and I think that has to be touched upon with cultural things like music, sharing, dreaming.
The deliberate fostering of a learning environment which set the grounds for mutual empowerment was a consistent priority amongst our interviewees, especially when bringing different knowledges together in a diálogo de saberes. In doing so, interviewees often put emphasis on relationality in the process, rather than learning geared only towards output or product. Across the board these were learning experiences centered on personal connections, not merely professional development. Ana Gonzalez [a program coordinator from the Basque Country], for example, described the importance of fostering an “ethos of mutual care” in intergenerational exchanges:
So it’s also about learning from the technical side but also from the relationship side not to judge people. To approach the older generation with more care and a humble attitude, in the way we should always pay attention to history from their side, and how we can set up a more sensitive dialogue with respect and feeling encouraged to teach the new entrants. And sometimes it’s about stressing their role as educators. Because when you re-dignify the role, people feel better.
Challenging hierarchy: a prefigurative politics
Interviewees stressed how horizontal learning enacts democratic processes and relations that are consistent with the politics of food sovereignty itself. As one participant put it, food sovereignty is about, “the rights of communities to decide on the food systems they want to build up and participate in” [Ana Gonzalez, a program coordinator from the Basque Country]. As Ana explained, this was often based on a commitment to challenge hierarchy, wherever it is found:
[our approach] is all about how to make this knowledge more significant for social movements and…for the social struggles ... to challenge to the idea that academic knowledge is the only knowledge that can be considered objective or of any value.
More than a mere set of techniques, horizontalism reflects a commitment to prefigure the kind of bottom-up social change envisioned by the food sovereignty project (Sitrin 2006). In short, horizontal approaches are rooted in the belief in our collective ability to make history and transform society. As such, horizontal pedagogies seek to dissolve the mental blockages or prejudices that often translate into the disabling top-down practices of agricultural research and extension. Indeed, a key focus of horizontal learning approaches is breaking down deeply embedded mental stereotypes that cast farmers and rural people—and especially women—in subservient and helpless roles, even while their capacity to transcend such obstacles has been repeatedly demonstrated (see: Holt-Giménez 2006; Fakih et al. 2003; Machín Sosa 2013; Meek 2015; Rosset et al. 2011; Pimbert et al. 2017; People’s Knowledge Editorial Collective 2017).
The political aspects of agroecology may to some seem somehow ‘natural’ or automatic, yet simply teaching agroecological practice will not automatically equate to political processes of social transformation. As we shall see in the following section the political and practical elements of training must be deliberately and carefully integrated.