ENFASYS

The ENFASYS project aims to stimulate a just and robust transition to sustainable, productive, climate-neutral, biodiversity friendly and resilient farming systems (SFS) by improved policies and business strategies that encourage farmers to change their production systems. In current food systems, farmers are challenged by multiple lock-ins that prevent them to move to SFS. To overcome this and thus to support the Green Deal and in particular the Farm to Fork ambitions, strengthening public strategies (policies) should go hand in hand with strengthening private strategies (business models, social innovations). To reach this aim, ENFASYS goals are (1) an improved understanding of lock-ins and levers in farming and food systems;(2) an improved understanding of behavioural factors of farmers, consumers and other food chain actors;(3) more and better evidence on the potential effectiveness of interventions;(4) a more structured approach to link knowledge to action.

To do so, ENFASYS will frame current transitions to SFS and screen 160 cases for current interventions. Through systems analysis, behavioural and experimental studies, ENFASYS will uncover lock-ins from a systemic and behavioural point of view. The potential of policy and business interventions will be tested in 12-15 countries across Europe through experimental studies and system dynamic modelling. To link systemic and behavioural insights to action and to understand the impact of the interventions on systems level, results of these studies will be combined into system and behavioural based theories of change. Together with stakeholders and enriched by the research results, ENFASYS will co-design policy mixes, business strategies and social innovations and stimulate their implementation. Strategic communication, dissemination, exploitation and tailored capacity building towards all our target groups, will maximize ENFASYS’ impact.

Role of GAIA: Consortium partner/WP leader/Task leader

Main activities and responsibilities of GAIA:

GAIA as leader of Task “Collaborate with other projects to integrate findings from these projects with results from ENFASYS project” taking into consideration the large amount of national and EU-level projects that can be linked to ENFASYS questions, will establish a collaboration and networking plan to build strong links to external projects, institutions, and networks, to enhance collaboration and mutual learning and to maximise the benefits across projects and networks.

GAIA as leader of Task “Management of the Multi-Actor approach” will take taking into consideration the role and expectations towards different actors during the project and will develop a Multi-actor approach protocol, which will be constantly updated. Within it will be described which actors will be involved, how they will be involved and what kind of knowledge is needed from the different actors in order to optimally achieve the project objectives.

Furthermore, GAIA is in charge for the implementation of WP “Develop business strategies, models a social innovation that collectively incentivise farmers to move towards SFS” In this framework, GAIA will lead the WP’s activities which aim to propose business strategies, new business models and social innovation that engage farmers, consumers and other food system actors in innovative ways to enable farmers to move towards more SFS, starting from a co-design approach on case level and upscaling the result to EU-level.