CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes at IF-ALL 2025

The second International Forum on Agroecosystem Living Labs (IF-ALL 2025) took place on October 15-17, 2025, in Bordeaux, France. The forum, co-hosted by INRAE (France) and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, brought together researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to examine how living lab (LL) approaches support innovation in agroecosystems. 

CGIAR’s Multifunctional Landscapes (MFL) Science Program (SP) participated through a set of oral presentations and poster contributions that aligned closely with the forum’s thematic focus on fostering transitions, empowering participation, and integrating policy. One MFL scientist also shared reflections and the SP’s approach and experience in a high-level panel discussion that interrogated the role of LLs as science-policy-society interface.  

This blog summarises MFL’s contributions and reflects how they are contributing to CGIAR MFL’s objectives. 

Some MFL Contributions at IF-ALL 2025 

Governance of Agroecological Transitions 

Angela Navarrete-Cruz from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT presented a comparative analysis of seven Agroecological Living Landscapes implemented across five countries. Her presentation, titled Multi-stakeholder platforms for the governance of agroecological transitions: A typology and lessons from seven Agroecological Living Landscapes, examined how different governance arrangements support or constrain agroecological change at landscape scale. 

The analysis highlighted the role of structured multi-stakeholder platforms in coordinating actors such as farmers, researchers, local authorities, and development organisations. While governance models varied by context, common features across cases included mechanisms for shared decision-making, locally grounded leadership, and iterative learning processes. These findings contributed empirical evidence to discussions on how institutional arrangements can support sustained agroecological transitions. 

In a second presentation, Governance Structures of Agroecological Living Landscapes in Five Countries, Navarrete-Cruz further explored how governance design, articulated across the five dimensions of scope, organisation, participation, formalisation & centralisation, influences the functioning and durability of landscape-level initiatives, with implications for policy alignment and long-term support. 

Co-design and Transdisciplinary Methods 

Lisa Elena Fuchs, also from the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, presented Methods for fostering transdisciplinary research and co-design of agroecological solutions through structured Vision-to-Action processes in multi-stakeholder spaces. The presentation introduced the Vision-to-Action (V2A) approach developed under CGIAR’s Agroecology Initiative (AE-I), and its adaptation to the Landscape V2A (LV2A) for the MFL SP. 

The V2A process provides a structured, participatory, and inclusive pathway for stakeholders to jointly envision and articulate long-term goals and identify concrete actions to achieve them. Fuchs illustrated how this approach has been applied in agroecological living labs (ALLs) to develop multi-actor, multi-dimensional, multi-level transition pathways, which allow aligning research priorities with stakeholder interests and needs, and  supporting collaboration across disciplines and sectors. The presentation emphasised methodological clarity and facilitation as key factors in translating shared visions into actionable research and development activities. 

Fuchs also participated in a high-level panel discussion on strengthening science-society-policy interfaces in agroecosystem living labs. The panel focused on how evidence generated through participatory research can be communicated and used in policy processes, and on the conditions required for sustained interaction between researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers. She highlighted the role that LLs potentially play, and outlined avenues for future research, including 

• LLs allow bringing together relevant stakeholders across domains and sectors at a scale that is spatially relevant to ecological and broader (local) food system concerns 
• LLs are vehicles for transdisciplinary research that can surface policy problems, and can allow identifying possible solutions, through the creation of necessary evidence at a relevant scale and the leverage of diverse entry points for localised solutions to general problems  
• LLs provide a space for experimentation and trial of policy applications to test diverse policy options 
• LLs provide a space fpr policy socialisation and acceptance, where already organised and articulated stakeholders can jointly address compliance concerns as well 

Lisa Elena Fuchs also presented a poster with the title Explicit engagement principles support the performance of agroecological living landscapes (ALLs) in terms of fostering transdisciplinary research and the co-design of solutions. It presents research that analysed the functioning and performance of the five ALLs established under the AE-I in Africa, and interrogated whether the facilitating researchers found a correlation between the nature and quality of the ALL engagement process and the resulting performance in terms of fostering transdisciplinary co-creation of knowledge and innovation. 

Advancing MFL’s Living Landscapes Agenda through IF-ALL 

CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes (MFL) program’s engagement in the International Forum on Agroecosystem Living Labs (IF-ALL) 2025 directly advanced several of its strategic objectives in alignment with the forum’s themes. By collaborating at IF-ALL, MFL was able to: 

• Co-create Knowledge Across Regions and Disciplines: MFL strives to co-develop knowledge and innovations with diverse stakeholders across different regions. At IF-ALL 2025, representatives from Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe shared experiences on how to leverage LLs to foster sustainable agroecological and/or agroecosystem transitions in food and land systems. This global exchange strengthened MFL’s role in cross-regional learning, as the program’s vision is for landscapes to be “co-created and managed by diverse stakeholders” through inclusive, collaborative innovation. Participating in such a worldwide forum thus reinforced MFL’s capacity to collaboratively generate solutions and accelerate agroecological transitions on a broad scale. 
• Test and Share Transdisciplinary Methods at Landscape Scale: MFL employs transdisciplinary, landscape-scale approaches that integrate science with local knowledge to design sustainable land-use solutions. IF-ALL 2025 provided a platform to present and refine these methods in a living-lab setting. The forum described LLs as “sandboxes” where innovative ideas and policies can be tested in practice. By showcasing MFL’s participatory research which brings together farmers, scientists, and other partners to co-design interventions for biodiverse, resilient landscapes the program could gather feedback and demonstrate its approaches to an international community. This experience both served to socialise MFL’s transdisciplinary methods and also highlighted the importance of empowering participation in research, echoing IF-ALL’s emphasis on inclusive collaboration. 
• Bridge Local Research and Global Policy: A core objective of MFL is to link on-the-ground research with policy frameworks, ensuring that evidence-based innovations inform decision-making from the local to the global level. Engaging with other international initiatives and policymakers at IF-ALL helped advance this goal. The 2025 forum focused on public policy and demonstrated how agroecosystem living labs can bridge science, society, and policy to drive systemic change. MFL representatives contributed insights from landscape-level projects to high-level dialogues, connecting community-based findings to global discussions on sustainable agriculture. This engagement strengthened MFL’s role in translating local lessons into policy action, exemplifying the integration of science, society, and policy in line with IF-ALL’s mission. 

Collectively, MFL’s participation in IF-ALL 2025 reinforced its mandate to foster agroecological transitions, empower stakeholder participation, and integrate scientific research with societal and policy needs mirroring the forum’s central themes and enhancing the program’s impact 

Informing Future Agroecological Living Lab Work 

CGIAR MFL’s participation in IF-ALL 2025 contributed empirical insights and methodological reflections to ongoing discussions on agroecosystem living labs. The presentations and posters were grounded in field experience and comparative analysis, offering evidence-based perspectives on governance, participation, and co-design across diverse landscape contexts. 

The forum also provided an opportunity for MFL researchers to situate their work within a broader international community of practice and to engage with parallel initiatives across regions and disciplines. These exchanges reinforced the importance of sustained attention to evaluation, institutional design, and policy engagement in living lab initiatives, particularly in contexts characterised by high social, ecological, and governance complexity. 

Importantly, IF-ALL 2025 marked a strategic moment for CGIAR’s engagement in the global living lab community. Following the decision that Germany will host the third edition of IF-ALL in 2026–2027, CGIAR has secured approval to host the fourth edition of IF-ALL, envisaged for 2028. This reflects growing recognition of CGIAR’s role as a convening platform that brings Global South perspectives into global discussions on living labs, agroecological transitions, and landscape-scale innovation. Hosting IF-ALL 2028 will create space to foreground experiences from low- and middle-income country contexts and to strengthen connections between research, practice, and policy across regions. 

As MFL continues its work across agroecological living landscapes, insights from IF-ALL 2025 are expected to inform ongoing research design, stakeholder engagement strategies, and collaboration with policy actors. The forum underscored that progress in agroecological transitions is incremental and context-dependent, and that living labs offer a useful, though demanding, approach when applied with methodological rigour, long-term commitment, and realistic expectations. 

Also read: 

Fuchs, L.E.; Falk, T.; Blundo Canto, G.; Bergamini, N.; Tristan, M.C.; Chimonyo, V.; Frija, A.; Rietveld, A.; Freed, S.; Robiglio, V. (2025) Landscape Vision-to-Action (LV2A) approach to co-design multi-stakeholder transition pathways for multifunctional landscapes. 77 p. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/180973 

Staiger, S.; Fuchs, L.E.; Navarrete, A.P. (2025) Same words, different worlds? Living labs in multifunctional landscapes - Aligning terminologies, approaches for optimal research for impact. [Blog post] CGIAR News. Published online 23 September 2025. URL: https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/same-words-different-worlds-living-labs-in-multifunctional-landscapes-aligning-terminologies-approaches-for-optimal-research-for-impact 

Triomphe, B.; Bergamini, N.; Fuchs, L.E.; Falk, T.; Blundo Canto, G.; Alary, V.; Rietveld, A. (2024) From Vision to Action (V2A) in agroecological transformation: Understanding and implementing principle-driven participatory action research in agroecological living landscapes. CGIAR Initiative on Agroecology. 48 p. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/169532 

Voss, R.C.; Freed, S.; Fuchs, L.E.; Triomphe, B.; Bergamini, N.; Dickens, C.; Quintero, M. (2024) Agroecological living landscapes toolkit. 29 p. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/169255