In response to environmental, economic, and social challenges, the living labs approach to innovation is receiving increasing attention within the agricultural sector. In this paper, we propose a set of defining characteristics for an emerging type of living lab intended to increase the sustainability and resilience of agriculture and agri-food systems: the “agroecosystem living lab”. Drawing on first-hand knowledge of case studies of large initiatives from Canada and France and supported by eight other cases from the literature, we highlight the unique nature of agroecosystem living labs and their distinct challenges with respect to their aims, activities, participants, and context. In particular, these living labs are characterized by exceptionally high levels of scientific research; long innovation cycles with high uncertainty due to external factors; and the high number and diversity of stakeholders involved. Both procedurally and conceptually, we link to earlier efforts undertaken by researchers seeking to identify urban living labs and rural living labs as distinct, new types of living labs. By highlighting what makes agroecosystem living labs unique and their commonalities with other types of living labs, we hope to encourage their further study and help practitioners better understand their implementation and operational challenges and opportunities.

Une épistémologie non-standard, relativement autonome des disciplines et du présent, est nécessaire pour caractériser une nouvelle logique de l’interdisciplinarité. Il s’agira de montrer comment la crise de la représentation des sciences, la modification des objets scientifiques contemporains, l’hétérogénéité et l’incompatibilité des modèles – un autre rapport au futur dans les sciences – nous conduit à pratiquer une « interdiscipline » qui ne peut plus être caractérisée comme la combinaison de connaissances disciplinaires différentes. Nous montrerons comment construire dans cette hétérogénéité des « lieux d’interdiscipline » qui permettent de nouvelles relations entre les disciplines, ainsi que des relations démocratiques entre disciplines. Cela suppose une translation ou une dérive des disciplines et une conception des objets comme « inconnus » et non représentables dans une « distance phénoménologique ».A non-standard epistemology, relatively autonomous of the disciplines and of the present, is necessary to characterize a new logic of interdisciplinarity. This will show how the crisis of representation in science, contemporary changes in scientific object, heterogeneity and incompatibility of models (another narrative of the future in the sciences), leads us to practice an “interdiscipline” that cannot be characterized as a combination of different disciplinary knowledges. We will show how, within this heterogeneity, building “sites of interdiscipline” allows for new relations between the disciplines, including democratic relations between disciplines. This implies a translation or derivation from disciplines, and a concept of objects as “unknowns” and not represented at a “phenomenological distance”

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Is the analytical framework used by ethologists sufficient to study the mental states of non-human animals (NHAs) at the appropriate level of complexity? To address this question our strategy was to i) reveal the experimental and analytic habits of scientists of different disciplines in the literature, and ii) use "intention" as a vector in an interdisciplinary prospect of the study of NHAs mental states. Our own intention was to outline the specific orientations and possible impasses of the ethological analytical framework which limits the consideration of NHAs intentions. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature published between 2016 and 2020 in two steps: 1. through a first corpus, we identified the terms used in studies of NHAs intentions and 2. on this basis, 111 articles related to intentions in NHAs were selected. By analysing them using a co-occurrences network of the authors’ keywords, ten scientific approaches to intention in NHAs were identified. Our main findings are that i) the term « intention » is very seldom used in studies of NHAs; ii) approaches developed in humans are rarely transposed in these studies; and iii) in such few studies, it is not the NHAs intentions which are under question, but the link between NHAs and human intentions. This study highlights the limitations of the current theoretical framework used to study non-human animals’ cognition, which does not allow for the full spectrum of non-human cognitive specificities.