Context

Agricultural systems in South East Asia are at a crossroads between conventional intensive models and emerging agroecological approaches. The continuous intensification of conventional models which rely heavily on chemical inputs and capital is leading to a simplification of agricultural landscapes,  land degradation and biodiversity depletion, and to increased health risks for farmers and consumers. Moreover, beyond food and nutrition security, food safety is a rising concern, especially in relation to high pesticide residues, and to the contamination of soils and aquifers. Interestingly, agroecological approaches provide an increasing range of agricultural and market innovations towards healthier, environmental and sustainable practices.

Approach

With its comprehensive approach, the project will activate a variety of levers of the agroecological and safe food system transitions within three overlapping spheres of influence.

Structure

Methodology

The project will build a common broad-based methodological framework to:

• co-produce with large multi-stakeholder groups shared visions and plausible nested impact pathways of the ASSET, at flagship, national and regional levels using a Theory of Change (ToC) approach;

• assess and monitor the performances and impacts of innovations and pathways to the ASSET, and identify enabling conditions;

• plan and adapt action research activities at Flagship territorial level through learning

The formulation through participatory ToC tools of a federating strategy to reach the shared vision of the ASSET from local to regional levels will help transform the ALiSEA network into an open coalition of farmer organizations, policy makers, value chain operators, and research and development actors connected by a shared vision of ASSET pathways.

Knowledge generation from flagship to regional levels will feed into and be fostered through multi-stakeholder policy dialogue implemented from a local level through the flagship sites, national to ASEAN levels.

Impacts & Outcomes

Behind those impacts and outcomes, there are basically two assumptions, which ASSET’s approach is grounded on:

• Assumption 1: Strengthening the capacity and increasing the knowledge and ownership of targeted stakeholders enables them to shift towards the agroecological and safe food system transitions
• Assumption 2: Providing multi-scale evidence of the performance and multidimensional impacts of agroecological practices within safe food systems enables multiple stakeholders to support and implement the shift towards the system transitions