Agricultural knowledge systems in transition: Towards a more effective and efficient Support of Learning and Innovation Networks for Sustainable Agriculture (SOLINSA)
SOLINSA is a three-year project that started in February 2011. It is funded by the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Community and involves eleven partner organisations. The CCRI is the UK partner and is taking a key role leading one of the Work Packages.
The overall objective of the SOLINSA project is to identify effective and efficient approaches for the support of innovation for sustainable agriculture and rural development. Farmers are developing innovations in many ways, for example, on-farm processing or energy production; participation in collective initiatives such as co-operatives; building new market arrangements to provide differentiated products to concerned consumers; implementing management practices to protect the environment and natural resources or growing non-food or novel crops. Often these innovations develop within networks, where the members can share knowledge, learn together and support each other. These networks emerge because of the absence of information from more formal sources to support innovation development.
A key aim of this project is to understand how such networks develop and operate in practice. Specifically it aims to identify barriers to their development and explore how policy instruments, financial arrangements, research, education and advisory services might effectively support learning in networks in cost-efficient and effective ways. The project will explore a variety of network case studies in a range of sustainable agriculture contexts in each of the partner countries.
In addition to the CCRI, the eleven partners are the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FBL), Switzerland; Pisa University (UNIPI), Italy; Wageningen University (WU), The Netherlands; Swiss Centre for Agricultural and Rural Development (AGRIDEA), Switzerland; Swiss Federal Institute for Technology- ETHZ; Baltic Studies Centre (BSC), Latvia; French Livestock Institute (Institut de l’Elevage) (IEL), France; University Hohenheim (UHOH), Germany; and the Institute of Economics of Hungarian Academy of Science (IEHAS), Hungary. The CCRI staff members involved are Julie Ingram, Nigel Curry, James Kirwan, Damian Maye and Katarina Kubinakova. The project value is £305,705.
