Workshop 3

Rural and Mountain Areas in Transition

FRAMEWORK AND OBJECTIVES
Globalisation has set rural areas on trajectories conditioned by the nature and intensity of mobility. The countryside has become a “moving mosaic”, with peripheral areas close to the centres and others further away but still under their control. Some margins remain isolated and depreciated, while others are productive and innovative. This diversity leads us to speak of rural areas subject to different logics. For a long time, their positioning was marked by a reading of their handicaps, in relation to metropolitan areas. To enable them to adapt to the consequences of the opening up of markets, these rural areas have been invited to develop endogenous approaches. The culture of the regional project has taken root in these areas, in an ongoing quest for identity, homogeneity and the enhancement of specific features.
Today, the multiplication and worsening of crises are calling these balances into question, and are confronting rural areas with the challenges of transition. Other approaches are emerging. We need to move on from a policy of compensating for handicaps to policies of transformation, in terms of ecology and energy. Instead of the “territory project”, the “network project” aims to connect resources to amplify their benefits. Instead of endogenous autonomy, empowering autonomy aims to develop know-how on one’s own, among others. These issues are not unique to rural areas. However, the low population densities associated with the proximity of natural resources make them, in certain situations, learning areas, “learning territories” in the face of future transitions.
The aim of the workshop is to examine the trajectories of rural areas in the face of these transitions. There is a controversy between those who believe that local authorities have the capacity to initiate and implement appropriate local policies, and those who believe that only collective, localised initiatives can innovate and ensure the conditions for a genuine transition. Our hypothesis is that the ability to transform the trajectory of local areas lies in the quality of the relationship between the people behind these innovations and local authorities. Far from the posture of local authorities taking over innovation, we need to think about the conditions for hybridisation, which involves developing networks or operators with the capacity to disseminate new values and principles of action. In this context, the Mediterranean mountains have significant experience of the complementarity of resources and their networking. It is an ideal place to study these innovative and instructive hybridisation processes.

STRUCTURE AND METHODS
The workshop will explore these hybridisations through 5 sessions. Each session will feature 3 papers, essentially based on the presentation and analysis of one or more case studies. Discussions will then be organised on the basis of cross-cutting questions from each of the workshops. The emphasis will be on exchanges with the other participants.
Expectations common to the various workshops
Papers will focus on the themes proposed in the workshops. They will be based on the observation of one or more rural or mountain areas, and may even be extended to the relationships they may develop with urban or metropolitan areas. They will seek to describe the trajectories of these areas, to understand the transitions they are facing, to identify the innovations that are being developed, the players involved and the ways in which they are organised, as well as the actions implemented to support them.

Coordinators:

Pierre-Antoine Landel (Grenoble Alpes University, France), Dimitris Goussios (University of Thessaly, Greece) ; Laurent Rieutort (Clermont-Auvergne University, France), Sylvie Lardon (INRAE, France), Theodosia Anthopolou (Panteion University, Greece)

Sessions

Workshop 3

Towards a territorial approach of the OneHealth vision: issues and perspectives?

Moderateurs: G. Calvo (Diversité et Développement), M. Champredonde (INTA), M. Gisclard (INRAE), I. Maglietti Smith (Origin for Sustainability)

Sessions

Visits

The “OneHealth” approach was introduced some twenty years ago (“One Health Basics | 2021”) and opens the perspective toward a global and systemic approach to human, animal and environmental health, usually considered in isolation. This holistic view places human Health within the Health of the ecosystem. It revolutionizes the understanding of human/non-human interactions and questions human activities and their ecological sustainability.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the excesses of a globalized, fragile and not very resilient production system and the impacts on ecosystem health. The degradation of agroecosystems plays a role in the increased prevalence of pandemics and the loss of biological richness in the environment.

The urgency of the pandemic and the ecological crisis invite territorial governments to take a stand and think about new sustainable development trajectories for territories’ health. First of all, they will have to be efficient in natural resource management and the regulation of production practices.

OneHealth brings a radically different ecological vision that shapes how we act and live in the ecosystem. Everything we do to our environments; we do to ourselves. It is a revolution in thinking, research objects, and the way disciplines work. By linking very different entities (soils, plants, ecosystems, bacteria and humans), the concept of OneHealth makes it possible to think differently about the joint changes to be made in agriculture, agribusiness and food (Duru, 2022).

In this context, we ask the following questions:

How are sustainable development issues addressed at the scale of territories and through the prism of a OneHealth approach?

What is the importance of territorial specificities (local resources, practices, landscape elements, wild biodiversity, biodiversity of domesticated species, consumption habits, etc.) concerning ecosystem health? What links do they have?

In this workshop, we will address these questions based on 4 thematic axes. The first concerns public policies at the territorial level and their role in communities’ health. The following sessions will address the “OneHealth” vision from different angles: wild and domestic fauna, human physiology and food practices, ecosystems and inter-species relations.