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Social Innovation in sustainable agri-food

Markus Frank and colleagues have been developing a Participatory Guarantee System to support agroecology in Argentina. 

This one’s for you if you’re also interested in social innovation for sustainable agri-food development, or other issues of action research in agroecological transitions. The authors share their lessons, also in Spanish! We invite you to read more about their research and to get in touch. They explain…

In local social innovation initiatives, farmers, processors and consumers build new collaborative ways of relating to each other to actively contribute to sustainable local development. They create awareness of social-ecological problems and needs related to agriculture and food and jointly develop new locally adapted production, distribution, and consumption practices.

Little is known about how these often poorly connected groups build relationships and what changes in social roles are needed to make the initiatives work. To conduct co-learning about these issues, I participated for four years in a local multi-stakeholder process in Northern Patagonia, Argentina. Using action research, we established a collaborative experimental learning space involving farmers, processors, consumers, agroecology students and teachers, with the general aim to contribute to the development of ecological sound, socially equitable, and economically viable local agri-food practices.

The jointly defined – and achieved – objective of the initiative was to develop and implement a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS). PGSs are interesting examples of social innovation, as they establish group-based guarantee mechanisms to certify agroecological farming and inspire local consumption. For instance, we developed locally adapted production standards, related to the no-use of harmful agrochemicals, and the promotion of biodiversity. We established group-governance structures to operate the PGS. Regular cross-farm visits were organized to verify compliance using product labelling, and local farmers’ market development was supported. Today, the developed PGS ECOMARCAL became a local institution and best practice example.

In the article, we share detailed “from within” perspectives and analysis of this development process. For instance, we learned about the need to build facilitated spaces of multi-stakeholder interaction where narratives of change are constructed, in terms of farm-level transitions towards agroecological management, and concerning how new social relationship-building and governance between poorly connected groups can be facilitated. Drawing on the concept of social roles, we found that changes in role understanding of the participating actor groups and the challenging performance of new roles are key to make PGS work. One important conclusion is that such local initiatives can potentially stimulate role changes in the wider community to expand social innovation in local food system development, and to establish multi-stakeholder (action research) collaboration in the support of agroecological transitions.

For the Spanish-speaking readership

The authors have prepared a Spanish translation of the article

Citation with article’s forever link 

Frank, M., Amoroso, M. M., & Kaufmann, B. (2025). Social innovation in the making: Action research on relationship building and role understanding in the co-development of a Participatory Guarantee System in Argentina. Action Research (2025) Vol 23 (3) https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503251316368