Addressing territorial resources to foster agroecological transitions in livestock farming systems

International audienceAnimal sector is strongly impacted by climate change, economic instability, environmental pressure and new social expectations. Despite these issues, animal farming have a place in global health through its potential role on soils, ecosystems, agriculture and food systems. For this, major transformations are required. Still, some research works have enlighten promising pathways for such agroecological transitions, around principles such as diversification and interconnection of activities, and embeddedness in local territory, to valorize the diverse local resources. The territorial resources supporting agroecological transitions combine material (soils, water, ecosystems), technical (equipment, factories), cognitive (training, collective organization), and socioeconomic (supply chains, public policies, local community support, work organization) resources. Analyzing combinations of resources and describing how agroecological systems mobilize them can help supporting agroecological transitions at local scale. In this communication, we propose to identify the territorial resources mobilized in four case studies for agroecological livestock systems. The case studies are chosen to represent a wide diversity of livestock systems (different levels of self-sufficiency, degree of crop-livestock integration…) and a diversity of natural and socio-economical contexts (PDO label, mountainous or intensive region…). The analysis is based on the diversity of uses of territorial resources and understanding of how the farming systems are embedded in their territories. In the different case studies, we explain how farmers could shift the management the territorial resources: on one hand with determinist innovations and on the other hand toward an open-ended transition. Finally, we propose a transversal framework analysis to discuss to what extent the sets of territorial resources should determine or not the agroecological transitions of livestock systems. Based on this we suggest possible developments for supporting such transitions in different territories