Designing Innovative Management for Cultivated Biodiversity: Lessons from a Pioneering Collaboration between French Farmers, Facilitators and Researchers around Participatory Bread Wheat Breeding

Abstract

The industrialization of farming has significantly threatened cultivated biodiversity. Participatory breeding endeavours to overcome this issue by enabling farmers to select a wide range of crop varieties in different conditions, and to foster genetic mixing through seed exchanges, crosses or mixtures. This necessitates the design of new forms of coordination and organization for the farmers and partners involved. This article reports on an ongoing initiative, aiming to facilitate the participatory design of such forms of coordination and organization. It first outlines the method used (Knowledge-Concept-Proposals or KCP), and how it has been tailored to this highly decentralized context involving politically engaged actors on a quest for autonomy. It then presents the exploratory results of the first two workshops: these include group consolidation, the sharing of heterogeneous knowledge, the generation of innovative ideas, and the elaboration of preliminary projects. Finally, this empirical case is compared with other initiatives supporting the participatory design of natural resource management strategies and tools. Its key original dimensions and benefits are that the workshop protocol is replicable, the data produced can be easily exploited, and it allows for testing hypotheses in the field of design science.

Networking agrobiodiversity management to foster biodiversity-based agriculture. A review

“…Operational approaches supporting the collaborative management of agrobiodiversity remain rare, with some examples related to participatory plant breeding (Chable et al 2014;Cecarelli and Grando 2020), or to collective 20 landscape management for associated biodiversity enhancement (e.g., Steingröver et al 2010). In most cases, these processes are poorly supported at the institutional level, whether for crop diversity (Berthet et al 2020) or associated biodiversity (Leventon et al 2017). Furthermore, these initiatives face multiple obstacles to collaboration, among which power imbalance is a major issue (Porcuna-Ferrer et al 2020).…”

Pesticide-free agriculture as a new paradigm for research

“…Following this perspective, participative breeding should be developed. Indeed, farmers could be part of the breeding innovation (Berthet et al 2020). First, participative breeding help preserve in situ genetic resources under climate change and innovative practices and then address evolving genetic capacities in addition to ex situ approaches (Hawtin et al 1996).…”

Exploring the emergence of participatory plant breeding in countries of the Global North – a review

“…Bread wheat (T. aestivum) has a large number of published projects ranging from conference proceedings to peer-reviewed journal articles. Projects exist in Europe (Dawson et al, 2010(Dawson et al, , 2011Enjalbert et al, 2011;Goldringer et al, 2012Goldringer et al, , 2019Malandrin and Dvortsin, 2013;Rivière et al, 2013aRivière et al, , 2013bRivière et al, , 2014Rivière et al, , 2015Rivière, 2014;Da Via, 2015;Vindras-Fouillet et al, 2016;Petitti et al, 2018;van Frank, 2018;Berthet et al, 2020;, CA (Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security, 2013; Entz et al, 2015Entz et al, , 2016Entz et al, , 2018Kirk et al, 2015), and the US (Murphy et al, 2005(Murphy et al, , 2013Lazor, 2008;Darby et al, 2013;Kissing Kucek et al, 2015;Kissing Kucek and Sorrells, 2016;Kissing Kucek, 2017) (Table 6). The large number of examples for bread wheat may be due to the existence of public plant breeding programmes at many universities and research institutions.…”