A call to the scientific community

We call on researchers from all disciplines to consider origin-linked quality signs in mountain territories as essential objects for comparative and longitudinal research on sustainability transitions — by co-producing knowledge with local actors, and by evaluating how governance, practices and culture can make these tools drivers of agroecological transformation, rather than vectors of new exclusions or harm to natural resources.

1. Governance and Action

Research must analyse origin-linked quality signs as tools of collective governance, in which rules, rights and responsibilities are collectively negotiated:

• Characterise how producer-led institutions and inter-professional bodies control specifications and shape the resilience of mountain food systems.

• Develop indicators to track sustainability over the long term at multiple scales (farm, value chain, territory).

• Design participatory and inclusive arrangements that guarantee genuine agency for women, young people, newcomers and vulnerable actors — beyond symbolic consultation.

• Analyse how governance can prevent disruptions, protect territories against abandonment and rural exodus, and manage tensions between actors without eroding collective cohesion.

2. Practices, Technical Cultures and Knowledge Systems

Origin-linked products crystallise technical cultures that integrate ecological knowledge, craft skills and long-term care for mountain ecosystems.

• Characterise how practices simultaneously manage biodiversity, soils, water and meadows, and how they adapt to climate change without eroding the link to origin.

• Distinguish innovations that strengthen the product–terroir link from those that favour standardisation and intensification — differentiating quality signs that support small-scale, diversified production from those that concentrate benefits within large-scale industrial structures.

• Document and validate tacit and sensory knowledge (gestures, textures, material cultures, reading of landscapes and animals).

• Design pedagogical models (mentoring, experiential training) that support intergenerational transmission.

3. Culture, Identity and Biocultural Resilience

Origin-linked mountain products carry ecological memory and cultural identity, and are therefore essential to biocultural resilience.

• Integrate landscape studies, food heritage and identity to capture the full biocultural fabric of territories (sounds, dialects, rituals, stories and everyday practices).

• Analyse identity dynamics — negotiated between small- and large-scale production, between locals and newcomers — and identify mechanisms that allow adaptive identities without displacing local cultures.

• Analyse the human costs of transition (loss of motivation, emotional pressure, fragmentation of collective structures) as central elements of sustainability.

4. Markets, Policies and Systemic Transformation

Origin-linked quality signs operate within globalised food systems characterised by power asymmetries and externalised costs.

• Connect microeconomic studies of supply chains with macroeconomic analyses (price formation, concentration of power, true cost accounting).

• Study the combinations of policies (standards, subsidies, taxation, public procurement, competition law) that can align origin-linked quality signs with climate, biodiversity and equity objectives.

• These analyses must be grounded in the concrete realities of marginal mountain territories: land pressure, demographic decline, competing land uses, and risks of territorial abandonment.

We invite all participants of Forum ODT 2025 to support this declaration and to circulate it in their scientific networks, in view of Forum ODT 2026.