Thank you to all the participants in the founding seminar of this book, held in October at Le Pradel, France, to Laurent Hazard who helped us to convene it and Pedro Lopez Merino to conceive it, and to all the 51 contributors who built it up with the contributions of their chapters or through their introductory writings.
We particularly thank Andy Stirling for the very inspiring preface he provided to this book. Thanks to Xavier Arnauld de Sartre and Olivier Petit who hosted and followed this project in their Ecopolis collection.
By the end of , the idea that the Covid crisis was a mere parenthesis had dissipated. By measuring the impacts on our personal, social, cultural and economic lives, we all began to perceive that there was a before and an after, in other words that we had found ourselves in a deeper sort of transition.
This new health situation thus makes this book all the more relevant. Of course, the aim here is to study the processes of a particular transition — the agroecological transition — but the questions raised by the group of 51 researchers from eight different countries will certainly find echoes in the debates within the political world and civil society: How can we understand and describe the processes of change?
This research and work on the agroecological transition are especially necessary as it is a complex phenomenon. It is complex first of all because it is multidimensional: the changes are technical, social, ecological and political all at the same time. But it is also complex because it takes place at several scales, from the farm or even the farm plot to the food systems.
