Co-Designing Agroecological Business Models: A Methodological Strategy for Innovating Farming Systems

Agroecology, with its holistic, multidisciplinary, and inclusive approach, holds a significant promise for shaping more sustainable, resilient, and equitable agri-food systems. By recognizing the importance of environmental stewardship, local knowledge, community involvement, and the reconfiguration of socio-economic relations, agroecology can revitalize agricultural and rural development pathways. Transitioning to agroecology is especially valuable to address the unmet needs of marginal areas and unlock new opportunities by leveraging the unique combination of natural, cultural, and socio-economic resources, thus staying deeply rooted in and relevant to local contexts. Driving the agroecological transition requires profound, systemic transformations across multiple levels (farm, agri-environmental landscape, and agri-food system), involving changes in various domains. Among the key means to enact these systemic transformations, business model innovation stands out as a vital enabler of agroecological transition at the micro-level. Indeed, innovating or developing new Business Models (BMs) makes possible to shape farming systems that are more closely aligned with the core values and objectives of agroecology. Over the years, a variety of frameworks, consisting of diIerent sets of principles or elements encompassing both normative and causative aspects (Wezel et al., 2020), have been developed to address the practical implementation of agroecology at diIerent scales, including the notable contributions from Altieri (1995), Altieri and Nicholls (2005), Dumont et al. (2013), CIDSE (2018), FAO (2018), and HLPE (2019). However, there remains a gap in integrating these valuable frameworks with a design thinking perspective, which could potentially provide a more structured and actionable approach for modeling agroecological farming systems. Indeed, creating or innovating Agroecological Business Models (ABMs) goes far beyond merely incorporating agroecological practices into existing BMs, but rather involves rethinking the very foundations of farming systems, demanding a fundamental redesign of their structure and functioning (Wezel et al., 2020). Specifically, no comprehensive set of agroecological principles or elements has been systematically anchored to design thinking tools, such as the Business Model Canvas (BMC). This study aims to investigate how farming systems can be redesigned and managed according to ecological and social principles (Gliessman, 2018; Barrios et al., 2020), by proposing a methodological strategy for co-designing ABMs through a participatory approach. The codesign process will be grounded on design thinking and BM design, integrated with the conceptual framework of the 10 elements of agroecology (FAO, 2018), and the assessment framework of Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) (FAO, 2019; Mottet et al., 2020).