The importance of agri-food systems for global sustainability calls for researching and advancing socio-technical transitions towards environmentally friendly models of farming. These transitions hinge on many prerequisites, one of which is providing access to land for farmers and new entrants who experiment with sustainable farming models. However, for socio-technical transitions in farming to be viable, access to land should be complemented with securing access to “intangible” resources such as skills, knowledge or networks. It seems that increasingly often these resources are being provided by various grassroots initiatives. The goal of this paper is to identify how the strategies employed by grassroots initiatives support farmers and new entrants in transitioning to sustainable farming models. In order to answer that question, we perform case studies of three Polish initiatives—Agro-Perma-Lab, PermaKultura.Edu.PL and the Ecological Folk High School in Grzybów—active in promoting agroecology, permaculture and organic farming. The results show a diversity of strategies employed by these initiatives that reflect the frameworks in which they operate. Considering these strategies from the perspective of transition studies suggests that they can be replicated in other contexts and potentially contribute to advancing socio-technical transitions of agri-food systems.

The regeneration of rural areas is a multifaceted process driven by a variety of actors operating in diverse contexts. Understanding specific barriers faced by these actors—as well as factors that contribute to the success of their initiatives—therefore seems to be a prerequisite for designing policies that can effectively support rural changemakers and thus promote rural regeneration. The goal of this exploratory paper is to identify key challenges and success factors for three types of rural changemakers—rural newcomers, new entrants into farming, and farming successors—based on empirical data gathered in three case studies conducted as part of the Horizon2020 project “RURALIZATION” in Poland in 2021. The results of the study show that one of the most important determinants of the success of rural changemakers’ activities is having adequate formal and informal knowledge. This is important in the context of knowledge transfer, interacting with and functioning in the local environment, and consequently laying the foundations for rural regeneration. Rural regeneration must be treated as a complex and long-term process that is strongly linked to the activation of knowledge transfer mechanisms.

The goal of this paper is to provide a preliminary analysis of European ecovillages considered as rural grassroots experiments with the sustainable management of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. The article presents empirical data on the management of basic resources in 60 European ecovillages collected with an online survey in 2020. The results show that a vast majority of ecovillages pursue some self-sufficiency in food, water or energy, and that 50% of them seek some self-sufficiency in all three of these resources. However, ecovillages do not try to be completely self-sufficient but rather aim at achieving feasible levels of self-sufficiency complemented with local and regional cooperation. While the role of ecovillages in driving conventional rural growth is limited, they can help in guiding sustainability transitions by illustrating opportunities and difficulties of reducing resource consumption of settlement units without reducing personal and communal well-being.