Towards a critical recovery of liberatory PAR for food system transformations: Struggles and strategies in collaborating with radical and progressive food movements in EU-funded R&I projects

Research Article Towards a critical recovery of liberatory PAR for food system transformations: Struggles and strategies in collaborating with radical and progressive food movements in EU-funded R&I projects Tobia S. Jones * , Anne M.C. Loeber 1 Faculty of Science, Athena Institute, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1085, Amsterdam 1081 HV, the Netherlands ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Participatory action research Food system transformation Public participation Liberatory research methodology Food movements EU research funding ABSTRACT From sustainability and justice perspectives, food systems and R&I systems need transformation. Participatory action research (PAR) presents a suitable approach as it enables collaboration between those affected by a social issue and researchers based in universities to co-create knowledge and interventionist actions. However, PAR is often misconstrued even within projects calling for civil society actors to act as full partners in research. To avoid reproducing the very structures and practices in need of transformation, this paper argues for university researchers to team up with members of food movements to engage in ‘liberatory’ forms of PAR. The question is how liberatory PAR’s guiding concepts of reciprocal participation, critical recovery and systemic devolution can be enacted in projects that did not start out as PAR projects. Two EU-funded projects on food system transformation serve as a basis to answer this question, generating concrete recommendations for establishing cocreative, mutually liberating, and transdisciplinary research collectives. PAR’s current challenge to action-oriented intellectuals is to recover the passion and commitment to creating social justice in partnership with the marginalized and oppressed peoples of the world in face of the new onslaught of manic capitalism, including co-opting forces aiming to reduce our passion to just another commodity… The key point is the notion of ‘recovery’. We don’t have to import or invent but rather recover and co-create. (Pyrch, 2007: 200). 1. Introduction Global and European agri-food systems are majorly corporate-led and industrial (Fernando, 2022; Clapp, 2023; FS4P, 2023), and increasingly recognised as extractive and unsustainable in form and nature (EEA, 2022: 7). Dominating forms of agriculture do harm to the health, wellbeing and existence of many human and non-human lives across the earth. As planetary life boundaries are crossed (Springmann et al., 2018), calls for food system transformation consistently articulated by marginalised social movements for decades, are newly echoed by long-standing centres and offices of institutional and structural power. For example, the European Union, akin to Western universities, has been a long-term enabler of an unsustainable global corporate food regime (McMichael, 2005, 2009; Holt-Gim´ enez & Shattuck, 2011), yet has recently called for sustainable food system transformations (EC, 2023). The question is how, and more particularly, what the role of academic research is in answering that question. Concurrently, R&I systems in Europe and globally are themselves critically questioned for their role in sustaining current the agri-food system (Fields, 2004; Brownell & Warner, 2009; Tempels et al., 2020; Rathenau Institute, 2020). Investigations done by a watchdog organisation on lobbying in Europe show that industries engage in public-private partnerships with the European Union to exert influence over research funding scheme priorities and the use of public EU money “for their own direct benefit” (Corporate Europe Observatory, 2020a, 2020b). Recognising the presence of such hegemonic forces in our own institutional context, we posit that a double transformation is needed, namely in both R&I and in agri-food systems, thus requiring a coupled systems perspective (Kok et al., 2019). This implies that the call for transformative change in the food system from a sustainability perspective is tied up with a wish for novel, participatory forms of * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (T.S. Jones). 1 Share first authorship. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Responsible Technology journal homepage: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-responsible-technology https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2024.100100 Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 Available online 22 November 2024 2666-6596/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of ORBIT. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ). knowledge production to nourish systems-change efforts. Participatory forms of knowledge production with an orientation on action have been explored and codified since the 1940s (Macaulay, 2017). Defined as research “emphasis[ing] dialogic engagement with co-researchers, and [developing and implementing] context appropriate strategies oriented towards empowerment and transformation at a variety of scales” (Kindon et al., 2007: 2), PAR can be made to mean many things. Notably in institutional settings that favour classic epistemic traditions and dominant perspectives on the relation between researchers and their ‘objects of study’, such a methodological reading of PAR may give way to shaping it to fit mainstream academic practices and publication traditions. For participatory research to avoid reproducing the very structures it seeks to transform, that will not suffice. Geared towards a genuinely transformative purpose, it must take the shape, we posit, of ‘liberatory PAR.’ Originally developed in South America in the 20th century, liberatory PAR is a suitable strategy for university researchers to contribute to the double transformation needed. It is rooted in the needs, knowledges, cultures, and objectives of the original co-creators of PAR. These were and are movements of Afro-descendent, indigenous, peasant, and/or urban working-class communities, primarily located in/from the Global 2 and directly resisting the extension of (agrarian) capitalism, increasing social inequalities and ecological destruction (Rappaport, 2020). Liberatory PAR comes with a repository of experiences, reflections and guiding concepts which can support university researchers to participate more horizontally, reciprocally and respectfully with(in) life-affirming communities who continue to inspire and/or lead contemporary progressive and radical food movements such as agroecology and food sovereignty (Desmarai, 2007; Gliessman et al., 2019), food justice (Alkon & Agyeman, 2011; Gottlieb & Joshi, 2010; Glennie & Alkon, 2018), and decolonial food movements (Grey & Patel, 2015; Milgroom, 2021; Eliott et al., 2023). This paper explores how liberatory PAR can be enacted in research projects geared to food system transformation even if such projects are not designed initially to re-orient university food system researchers to listen, align and respond to progressive and radical food movements. It asks to which extent and how university researchers can revitalize liberatory PAR given funding requirements and university settings in which R&I projects for food system transformation take place. In many of the efforts at researching options for and coordinating pathways to food system transformation funded in the European Union’s (EU) Horizon Europe (HE) research funding scheme, social movements are not engaged from the very start, in the proposal writing stage, or even the stage of drafting the call for proposals to which university-based researcher react. EU research funding serves as a strong lever influencing research and innovation (R&I) in Europe and beyond. Even though EU-funding requirements have increasingly promoted the participation of nonacademics in research projects and invite civil society actors to act as full partners in research, it remains to be seen if they enable full equitable participation in co-creating transdisciplinary knowledge, organizing skills and collective actions in pursuit of environmental sustainability and social justice. While food movements in the Global South experiment with and promote strategies for communityuniversity partnerships in collaborative enaction of social transformation (see Wezel et al., 2009; M´ endez et al., 2013, 2017; Gregory & Peters, 2018; Guzman et al., 2022; Kesselman, 2022; ACRAF, 2024), there is an absence of partnerships with these movements and their organisations in EU-funded R&I projects. This article asks how we, as university researchers, can revitalize a liberatory PAR praxis with progressive and radical food movements while navigating EU-funded R&I projects for food system transformation? In answering this question, we offer a response to calls for a critical recovery of PAR (Braun & Loeber, this issue; Pyrch, 2007; Rappaport, 2020). Our own experiences with struggles, strategies and failings to accompany and resource food movements from different positions and roles within two EU-funded projects, both designed from the ambition of food system transformation, serve as a basis for bringing discussions onward and inward with how this can be done in practice within the confines of EU-funded research. First, we revisit empirically grounded accounts of original formulations of PAR as co-created in the 1970s and 1980s in Colombia (Oslender, 2016; Rappaport, 2020) and the broader Global South (Swantz, 2016; Tandon & Hall, 2014). This analysis is intended as a critical recovery of the radical origins of PAR as a mutually liberating and transformative process between members of marginalised communities belonging to progressive and/or radical movements and university researchers. In doing so, Section 2 articulates three guiding concepts that can inspire and safeguard a liberatory PAR process, that also serve as benchmarks for our current praxis. Section 3 thereupon details our methodological approach that combines a descriptive, historical analysis of participative closures and openings for societal actors in EU-funded R&I projects with a first-person narration of our own experiences with PAR. Subsequently, Section 4 analyses the evolution of staged participation and stakeholder helixes in R&I projects funded by successive EU Framework Programmes from 1994 to 2027 to further contextualise and understand how they can enable and disable liberatory PAR. In Section 5, we empirically cross-pollinate our current efforts to work with liberatory PAR within two on-going EU-funded projects, FoodCLIC and FOSTER, designed in response to calls for food system transformation. Drawing on these experiences, we conclude with suggestions for university researchers to recover and revitalize PAR with radical and progressive food movements who are compelled to collaborate for double transformations and mutual liberation. 2. Radical origins of liberatory PAR: lost and found? The discussion whether PAR is a methodology for research, or a research strategy is more than a matter of semantics. In 1983, Fals-Borda was the first to academically coin the label Participatory Action Research (Hall, 2005: 8; see Rahman, 1983: 1) in English and Spanish, distributing equal significance to action and participation in a research process (Rahmann, 2008). However, Rappaport’s (2020) rigorous archival research de-thrones Fals-Borda, or any individual academic, as ‘the’ originator of PAR. Fals-Borda’s conceptualisations of “liberatory PAR” are rooted in the Latin American tradition of “participatory research geared towards transformative action” (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022: 357, Fals-- Borda, 2001). As Cornish et al. (2023: 2) point out, PAR therefore is not a methodology but rather “constitutes a strategic rallying point for collaborative, impactful, contextually situated and inclusive efforts to document, interpret and address complex systemic problems.” Dubbing PAR a methodology allows for an appropriation that does not do justice to the plurality of cultures and geo-histories of people with their own PAR genealogy, such as African, Black feminist, EuroAmerican, Indian, Indigenous and Latin American traditions (idem) who use PAR as a strategy to pursue their goals without claiming exclusive ownership or authorship. Therefore, in retrieving PAR for the purpose of food system transformation, we resist the tendency to abstract universalizing principles of it as a methodology, but rather engage with original experiences and guiding concepts of PAR. More than a set of procedures, we take, following (Rappaport, 2020: 199) PAR to be a ‘principled stance’, an ‘attitude’ (Kidd & Kral, 2005) with “respect for people and for the knowledge and experience they bring to the research 2 We subscribe to Mignolo’s (2011: 185) definition of the “Global South” ... not a geographic part of the planet, but the places on the planet that endured the experience of coloniality - that suffered, and still suffer, the consequences of the colonial wound (e.g., humiliation, racism, genderism, in brief, the indignity of being considered lesser humans), and from that experience the spiritual and decolonial options that are contributing to build a non-imperialist and non-capitalist world. T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 2 process, a belief in the ability of democratic processes to achieve positive social change, and a commitment to action” (Brydon-Miller et al., 2003: 15). 2.1. Liberatory PAR, a Latin American tradition Until recently, many European-based universities seem to experience a general amnesia regarding the original practices and conceptualisations of PAR (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022). Critical recovery work of a few scholars contributed to an increasing acknowledgement that PAR originates from what is called the ‘Third World’, the Global South or Majority World (Lykes & Mallona, 2008; Guti´ errez, 2016; Wakeford & Sanchez Rodriguez, 2018; Rappaport, 2020; Pereira & Rappaport, 2021; Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022; Cornish et al., 2023). Most recognition of PAR’s origins is granted to the protagonism of the aforementioned Fals-Borda (Torres, 2019; Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022). Fals-Borda conceptualised a research paradigm that “supports and sustains the conditions for collective analysis and action through harnessing the creativity and wisdom of marginalized peoples” (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022:34). After self-critiquing his vanguardist praxis and after exchanges with Latin American, African and India participatory researchers involved in popular education movements, Fals-Borda re-defined his research strategy as a radical and participatory form of action research (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022; Cornish et al., 2023). Yet, the approach to working which Fals-Borda had the privilege of naming liberatory PAR emerged from the dynamic political collaborations between social movements of peasant and indigenous organisations, and a relatively independent transdisciplinary research-activist collective in Colombia during the early 1970s. Intimate and novel collaborations were forged to counter increasing social inequality, ecological destruction, and the expansion of agrarian capitalism (Fals-Borda, 1969; Rappaport, 2020). One of the first manifestations of PAR took place on Colombia’s Caribbean coast in the department of C´ ordoba as a collaboration between the National Association of Peasant Users (ANUC-Línea Sincelejo) and La Fundaci´ on del Caribe from 1972 to 1974 (Rappaport, 2020). The first-mentioned organisation was founded in 1972 to independently realize agrarian reform with organized land occupations after disillusionment from the national organization’s official efforts to redistribute land. Many of their leaders collaborated as internal researchers via a partner organisation, Centro Popular de Estudios. In the same year, La Fundaci´ on del Caribe was founded as a network of young aspiring researchers, activists and artists who were mostly from the same region but had grown up in coastal cities. Together these organisations and networks developed ways to communicate, value and respect indigenous, campesino (peasant or small-scale farmer) and afro-descendent cultures and knowledge systems (Rappaport, 2020). What they share in common is that they still remain in communion or dialogue with their ancestors and/or the living territories to which/who they felt deep belonging and radical inter-dependence (Escobar, 2017). External academic researchers from an organization funded by the US Presbyterian Church inserted themselves alongside these networks and social movements across Colombia. Many of them were disillusioned with their academic training in positivist social science from Euro-American universities as this was inappropriate to their lived realities and struggles as Colombians (Fals-Borda & Brandao, 1986). They learnt to liberate themselves from the mandate to claim objectivity, by deconstructing the researcher-researched power asymmetry, and reframing research objects or subjects as ‘co-researchers’. Reciprocally, the academic researchers became politically committed and active participants in social movement organisations and grassroots communities of the co-researchers. This amounted to a shift from participation by people towards participation with people for mutual liberation (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022), i.e. a shift from researcher as a “isolated autonomous individual to a contextualized, historical agent-in-community” (Lykes & Mallona, 2008: 112). 2.2. Three guiding concepts in liberatory PAR It is beyond the scope of this article to elaborate original liberatory PAR processes in detail. Yet, the historical-empirical work done by Rappaport (2020) foregrounds three guiding concepts that emerged from radical experimentation with grassroots communities of social movements in PAR processes. The three guiding concepts offer a conceptual framework to understand the conditions and commitments that enable(d) liberatory PAR. They provide the grounds to strategize and analyse how liberatory PAR can(not) be applied in contexts of EU-funded R&I projects led by universities. 2.2.1. Reciprocal participation: PAR processes benefit all involved Participation is reciprocal and bi-directional. This meant that the participatory collaboration benefitted both leaders and members of oppressed communities, groups and organisations who became internal researchers, and their collaborating external university researchers who supported their objectives and participated in their actions or activism for desired changes (Brand˜ ao, 2005: 56). Reciprocal participation is long-term relationship building which requires a radical commitment from researchers to intimately participate in lives of communities, to listen to their members’ feelings and needs, understanding their ways of knowing as well as their connections to broader social movements for structural change. Reciprocally, systemically marginalised community members actively engage and exercise their right to decide and give consent to all aspects and stages of the research, from formulating research questions to knowledge dissemination (Rappaport, 2020). Therefore, knowledge making and action taking are co-produced democratically, and oriented towards progressive and radical socio-political change. As Cornish et al. (2023: 3) these PAR projects usually emerge from long-standing collaborative practices between universities and social movements “strengthened by institutional backing in the form of sustainable staff appointments, formal recognition of the value of university–community partnerships and provision of administrative support.” In short, participation is a two-way street and entails much more than knowledge co-construction. 2.2.2. Critical recovery: PAR processes do justice to heritage, identity, and context Action-cum-knowledge coproduction attends to revitalizing and strengthening elements relevant to the collaborating communities, such as cultural values, practices, organizing tools and/or institutions (Bonilla et al., 1972: 51–52). Notably those elements that were relevant in these communities’ struggles of resistance and liberation from systemic oppression and marginalization were put centre stage (Rappaport, 2020). For example, the aforementioned peasant association, ANUC-Línea Sincelejo, articulated and embraced values and practices from their cultural heritage to nourish peasants’ psyche and shared identity. They co-designed and established “communal landholdings” modelled on historic socialist collectives from the same territories (Rappaport, 2020: 25). Via appreciative inquiry and archival work, elders serving as local role-models were interviewed and incorporated. They shared testimonies of organized peasant resistance and dignified living, and they deliberated with internal and external researchers on which concepts and images were most relevant for present-day conditions to inspire younger generations. As is stated above: “We don’t have to import or invent, but rather recover and co-create” (Pyrch, 2007:200). 2.2.3. Systemic devolution: PAR products take consensual and suitable forms A critical aspect of PAR is returning the results or fruits of the collaborative process in forms which are valuable and generative to grassroots communities and organisers of social movements and in ways which promote and respect their autonomy on what to do with the results (Pereira & Rappaport, 2021). In the original manifestations of PAR, a diversity of knowledge forms was co-produced and valued (Rappaport, T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 3 2020). The research collective was inherently transdisciplinary, composed of internal and external researchers who crossed class, race, gender, and cultural boundaries, and who embraced or made space for activist and artistic forms of action, knowledge making and dissemination. For instance, the research collective La Fundaci´ on del Caribe included a painter, primary school teacher, creative writer, a musician, and a children’s author (Rappaport, 2020). These researchers, with or without an academic background, shared political goals and became part of grassroots communities respected as local manifestations of broader societal movements to end oppressive and exploitative systems. In other words, liberatory PAR engages local experts, with their own ways of knowing, being and organising that, as Fals-Bord learnt, did and do not need to be saved by ‘enlightened’ intellectuals or external vanguard leadership (Rappaport, 2020; Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022). Systemic devolution in light of this typically means that funder reports and academic articles are de-centred to the advance of a variety of transdisciplinary knowledge forms and follow-up activities. Examples include community workshops, political actions, radio programs, graphic stories, cultural celebrations, puppet shows and theatre performances (Díaz-Ar´ evalo, 2022), depending on what corresponds with the cultural preferences, literacy, and political awareness of intended audiences. The results function as a community archive and should serve as a springboard to promote and inspire further dialogue and collective action towards common goals. 2.3. Liberatory PAR in the 21st century Today, the legacy of PAR remains with participatory research that takes action to challenge and steer away from an oppressive corporate food regime while organizing in ways that correspond with the aforementioned three guiding concepts (Holt-Gimenez & Shattock, 2011; Motta, 2021). Experimentation with PAR by progressive and radical food movements is abundant among food sovereignty movements (Wezel et al., 2009; see M´ endez et al., 2013, 2017; Guzman et al., 2022), notably La Via Campesina that advocates for redistributive land reform, dismantling corporate monopoly power, and promoting democratic and regional agroecological food systems with community rights to land, water and seed. In Latin America (Abya Yala), liberatory PAR has been incorporated and adapted into the repertoires of autonomous indigenous organisations, such as CRIC in Colombia, who do their own research without university coordination (Rappaport, 2020: 197–232). Holt-Gimenez and Shattock (2011) theorize that if food sovereignty and food justice movements are strengthened and form durable alliances, they will build sufficient power to achieve radical structural reforms whereby agri-food systems become environmentally sustainable and socially just. In other words, if we, as university researchers, can accompany, join, support and/or connect food movements, we stand a better chance of transforming a larger share of food into community and public goods instead of market-driven commodities. As Rappaport (2020) observes, in contrast, action researchers based in Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America have been less affiliated with social movements. That is the case even among Western researchers who are open to critical and Southern epistemologies (Santos, 2018). This is striking as in line with a long-standing debate on democratizing science (see e.g. Braun & K¨ onninger, 2018; Cohen, 2022), nowadays research is open to the active involvement of non-academics as research partners, as expressed e.g. with the widely adopted phrase ‘citizen science’ (Haklay et al., 2021). Citizen science is a flexible concept referring to a broad range of roles for citizens in research, ranging from assisting researchers in data collection to “non-literate people and those with little or no understanding of technology” bringing their “traditional ecological knowledge” to the table, to “empower” them by helping scientists to protect their habitat (Smith, 2022). The latter view is referred to as “extreme citizen science” (idem, emphasis added). Notably with the increasing emphasis on ‘just’ and ‘equitable’ societal transformations and research (see e.g. Doyon et al., 2024), the latter forms of ‘citizen science’ seem to present not an ‘extreme’ variant of what in regular academic work is considered ‘citizens science’, but rather a modest point of departure to work towards an approach that is guided by reciprocal participation, critical recovery and systemic devolution, that is, by liberatory PAR. Obviously, 21st century conditions under which researchers operate in Western European universities are radically different from those in place in the 1970s and ‘80 s in South America. Still, assuming that collaboration with food movements may benefit the system transformation agenda of the European Union (EU) as a research funder, the question is to which extent and how university researchers can revitalize liberatory PAR given funding requirements and university settings in which R&I projects for food system transformation take place. 3. Methodology The way in which this research question will be answered echoes the origins of this paper. As academics affiliated with Western European universities working on EU-funded food system transformation projects, we, authors, shared our views and experiences in conversation. We were both struck and puzzled by how, despite potentially radical research project ambitions, the execution of the research projects time and again threatened to amount to disbalanced, even extractivist forms of collaboration with societal project partners. A first line of reasoning in answering our question was elaborating the roles and room assigned to non-academically affiliated, ‘societal’ partners in subsequent EUfunding schemes. The resulting historical reconstruction based on document analysis, we then complemented with an analysis of the way in which ‘participatory action research’ currently features in EU-funded research projects, based on a search in CORDIS, the repository in which the results of EU funded research and innovation are collected. Secondly, the question is answered from a first-person perspective based on personal experiences with two projects we identified as critical case studies (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Critical cases are selected on the basis of the expectation that they serve as pars-pro-toto to “maximize the utility of information from small samples” (ibid.: 230). That is the case with the FOSTER project, “Fostering food system transformation by integrating heterogeneous perspectives in knowledge and innovation within the E[uropean] R[esearch] A[rea]”, and the FoodCLIC project on “Creating resilient urban food environments for access to healthy, just, and sustainably produced food”, which are both funded under the Horizon Europe funding scheme. FOSTER in principle sets a stage to engage with liberatory PAR as it seeks to promote “the inclusion of the most vulnerable individuals and families” as well as “citizen science” to contribute to “a fair healthy and environmentally friendly food system” (all quotes, FOSTER DoA, 2022 3 ). The FoodCLIC project focuses on developing sectoral connections and spatial linkages to further “sustainability co-benefits to transform food systems in city-regions”, and focuses too on “empowering communities”, among them “deprived and vulnerable groups” (CORDIS, 2024). 4 Using reflexive topical autobiography (Johnstone, 1999) as a method enables an investigation of praxical accounts of working with (liberatory) PAR in a way that befits its substantive focus, namely decentring the “detached observer … paving the way for the admission of multiple realities and interpretations of lived experience” (ibid.: 24). The narratives of experienced struggles, strategies, failures, limitations are organized in terms of the three guiding concepts of liberatory PAR as elaborated above. 4. EU research funding as a progressive history of invited participation The emphasis in European integration dynamics first and foremost focused on the construction of a common market and on self-sufficiency 3 https://fosterfoodsystem.eu/ 4 https://foodclic.eu/ T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 4 in food production, but in the 1990s the relevance for Europe’s economy of transnationally coordinating research began to grow (Hoenig, 2018). In 2000, the European Research Area (ERA) was called into being, a decade and a half after the first of a series of multi-annual research funding schemes was launched via which science policy in the EU was integrated and elaborated. Initially dubbed Research Framework Programmes (FP), the first FP was launched in 1984 for four years. Like its successors FP2 and FP3, the aims of the funding scheme were to promote “a harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion and an accelerated raising of the standards of living” throughout the community via “balanced scientistic and technical development” (EC, 1983). The initial funding programmes focused on the life sciences, nuclear energy and IT to keep up Europe’s competitive position. The 4th Framework Programme, which ran from 1994 to 1998, was the first EUbased research and innovation funding scheme that included socioeconomic research (Must, 2019). This choice was informed by political concerns, with international relations more and more revolving around “soft power” as articulated at the time of the 5th enlargement of the EU (ibid.: 1). Yet it was also closely intertwined with increasing demands in society for a democratisation of technological decision making. ‘Participation’ became an issue in research, particularly in the field of Technology Assessment (TA), which was elaborated in various methods to broaden debates on technological development and innovation (Loeber, 2004). Interestingly, even when seeking to include a “pure public” (Braun & Schultz, 2010) in designing a participatory TA process, ‘publics’ are, it was observed in later critical work, almost inevitably ‘constructed’ or ‘made’ (e.g. Soneryd, 2016: 147) in relation to a certain way of framing an issue by the researchers involved, or the research commissioning party. Consequently, ‘public participation’ in any effort at joint research and action inevitably amounts to form of “invited participation” (Wynne, 2007; Wehling, 2012). While the life science remained a spearhead in EU funding, from the 5th Framework onward (1998–2002), the focus shifted towards stimulating socio-economic benefits through research (Arnold et al., 2008: 24). Research was conceived to help solve societal problems and to respond to the major socio-economic challenges facing Europe. This marked what one might call a ‘responsive turn’ in EU-based R&D funding, which would later on be elaborated into what eventually became known as mission-oriented research (see below): "Society is making firm demands from researchers and they need to consider the social aspects of their activities", the European science minister Edith Cresson was recorded saying at the launch of the programme (MacFarlane, 1999). This engagement with citizens and society was further institutionalized in FP6 that ran from 2002 to 2006, in which ‘Citizens and governance in a knowledge-based society’ was made a thematic priority. Among the funded projects was a project (PAGANINI 5 ) which investigated how to avoid the conceptual pitfall of understanding ‘participation’ as a-priori being ‘invited’, implying a given entity or process for people to participate in To that end, following Dewey (1991), it understood ‘governance’ as referring to any series of acts that people undertake to organise the allocation and prioritisation of values and the distributions of resources and risks (Loeber et al., 2005). Creating such conceptual space could in principle contribute to creatively dismantling barriers for engagement in joint problem framing, knowledge co-creation and political association. But conceptual freedom does not equal institutional space. An evaluation of the next Framework Programme, FP7, which ran from 2007 to 2013, showed that funding under this Framework had been particularly effective in strengthening scientific excellence and contributing to increasing the competitiveness of Europe’s industry but not in engaging with the public. 6 For Europe to move forwards, recommendations for the next funding scheme included the advice to “focus[…] on society’s major challenges [and] involve[…] citizens in research strategy and topics” (idem). Indeed, with the next funding scheme, Horizon 2020 (H2020), which ran from 2014 to 2020, the nature of EU funding changed. The programme was as always designed to contribute to Europe’s employment and competitive position, but societal issues as such also became organisational foci. The EC opted for “mission-oriented research and innovation” as a principled basis for disseminating research funds: “By harnessing the directionality of innovation, we also harness the power of research and innovation to achieve wider social and policy aims as well as economic goals” (Mazzucato, 2018: 4). To do so responsibly and responsively, the notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) was coined as a cross-cutting issue within H2020 (Von Schomberg, 2013). RRI built on such academic and business initiatives as Technology Assessment to ensure public engagement and science education, next to gender equality, ethics, and Open Access. The focus on RRI gave impetus to new experimentation with participation in H2020. Among the innovative approaches were Living Labs (Erisman et al., 2024) or Social Labs (Braun et al., 2022) as a form of action research (Loeber in Ercan, 2020). However, notably the enduring emphasis on ‘excellence’ in science structurally hindered researchers to engage (with) societal actors in a participatory manner (Cohen & Gianni, 2022). The current funding scheme ‘Horizon Europe’ (HE) replaced H2020 and runs until 2027. At the time of HE’s launch, there were intense debates about whether RRI, including public engagement, as a concept had been discarded by the Commission in favour of creating jobs, boosting economic growth, and promoting industrial competitiveness (Macq et al., 2020). Some argued (see e.g. Robinson et al., 2021) that the contrary is the case: instead of prolonging RRI as an add-on to an otherwise industry and innovation-oriented programme, the very idea of attending to, and building on the relationship between science and society was now integrally absorbed in funding requirements. Indeed, the legislative act establishing the HE programme includes that: “With the aim of deepening the relationship between science and society and maximising the benefits of their interactions, the Programme should engage and involve all societal actors, such as citizens and civil society organisations, in co-designing and co-creating responsible research and innovation (RRI) agendas, content and throughout processes that address citizens’ and civil society’s concerns, needs and expectations …” (EU Regulation, 2021/695). In other words, HE explicitly welcomes the involvement of citizens and civil society organisations. Two questions follow from this, in view of liberatory PAR: does this invitation also includes social movements? And does this invitation include participation at a stage that decisions on the direction of the research and its empirical foci can be made jointly with societal partners? Considering that the emphasis on widening participation in the HE programme is gradually increasing, this may well be the case. The current Work Programme states: “Europe-wide citizen science campaigns should require the involvement of quadruple helix stakeholders" (EC, 2024: 109). The quadruple helix is a stakeholder selection model to for engaging representatives from government, science, business, and civil society in a participatory process (Carayannis & Campbell, 2009). It is interesting to note that with these on-going developments towards more participation-oriented dynamics in EU research funding, the notion of Participatory Action Research is more and more used. In H2020, a total of 31 projects funded included PAR as a research strategy, according to the projects’ depository CORDIS. 7 FP7 featured 5 such projects, against 2 in FP4, and 1 in FP6 respectively. In HE, already 8 projects that include PAR have received funding. Also, in recent formal EU publications, PAR is mentioned, e.g. in a leaflet by the European Research Council (ERC), that refers to PAR as a form of or vehicle for citizen science (ERC, 2022: 4). It is against this European funding backdrop that the two cases discussed here, the FOSTER project and the FoodCLIC project, unfold. 5 https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/505791/it 6 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/de/MEMO_16_146 7 https://cordis.europa.eu/, accessed 29 June 2023 T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 5 5. Engaging with liberatory PAR in horizon Europe food system transformation projects Our efforts to revitalize PAR are situated within the context of R&I projects for food system transformation funded in the EU’s HE-scheme. In the projects, we are involved as researchers based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The design of the selected projects is elaborated in a socalled ‘description of action’ (DoA), which structures discussions on who is involved in the project and why, and communicates the types of products (knowledge forms, actions, and relations) the projects are supposed to yield. We analyse how the designs and methodological approaches of each project foreclose or open applications of liberatory PAR. We then reflect on how the unfinished projects have, so far, played out in practice, with particular attention to PAR openings and our own struggles, strategies, successes and failures to apply the three guiding concepts as identified as crucial to liberatory PAR. 5.1. FOSTER: integrating heterogeneous perspectives in the food system’s knowledge base as a lever for system transformation The FOSTER project took shape in response to the Horizon Europe 2021 call “GOVERNANCE 01 02 European Research Area food systems science.” It seeks to accelerate dynamics towards transforming the food system. It does so by exploring possibilities for changing the scientific knowledge base that feeds into the food system in the European Research Area. More precisely, FOSTER promises to “build food system capabilities, knowledge and new governance mechanisms for scientists, citizens and policymakers to explore novel knowledge and innovation approaches integrating food systems research with citizen science activities in a range of case studies (‘Citizen Driven Initiatives’, CDIs) representing European diversity” (FOSTER DOA, 2022, p.3). The current knowledge base is known as the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS). FOSTER hypothesizes that, while the currently knowledge base has greatly contributed to improving the quantity and quality of food production over the years, it is not adequate to help Europe move towards a more sustainable and resilient food system. In particular, FOSTER seeks to challenge the knowledge base’s focus on agriculture, by broadening that towards other aspects of food (such as food processing, retailing, consumption and waste management), as well as to make it more inclusive, enabling knowledge flows between the academic world and the lifeworld of non-academically affiliated knowledge carriers. The envisaged result, eventually, of such a transformative change process is a reoriented and more inclusive food-oriented knowledge system dubbed ‘FoKIS.’ Working towards an understanding of what FoKIS should entail, FOSTER adopts a methodological approach that is highly diverse. It combines efforts at forecasting and horizon scanning with educational activities to spread systems thinking in relation to food, as well as with activities to influence the Knowledge & Innovation system’s governance. What stands out among these varied approaches is the choice to include non-academic food-system-oriented change agents as full partners in the project. With RRI infused into the backbone of the HE programme in which FOSTER is funded, the ambition to include the voices, knowledges and worldviews of non-academic actors in research materialized in the project, which was set up to have “relevant present and future stakeholders … strongly integrated in project activities from day 1 ″ , and ensure all project activities are done in co-creation and co-learning processes. These processes are supported by a scientific reflection and assessment in the form of Reflexive Monitoring in Action (RMA, Van Mierlo et al., 2010). The societal partners (CDIs) were identified in the final stages of proposal writing, to be included as full partners in the consortium. The aim of involving societal partners was to engage these “in a co-creation and co-experimentation process together with science partners and other stakeholders, to advance context-specific CDI objectives.” A set of criteria was elaborated by the academic partners working on the proposal to guide their search for CDIs. These included (i) the initiative is not driven and managed by a research institution, and not exclusively depending on public research funds; (ii) the initiative is ongoing, serious and active with substantial members/partners actively involved; (iii) the initiative is open and committed to apply a citizen science approach and explore perspectives on R&I policy; (iv) there is at least one key person active in the initiative that is willing to spend (funded) time on the project (around at least 0,25 FTE); and (v) The initiative has an own legal entity or can be represented by any legal entity. The CDI partners were found and approached through the networks of the academic partners. 5.1.1. Nurturing reciprocal relationships The eventual selection of CDIs as partners was based notably on prior collaborations academic partners had with an organisation, mostly in the context of other (EU-funded) research projects. This implied practically that a potential partner was in the possession of a Participant Identification Code (PIC), which makes them eligible for EU funding. Less explicit, but definitely at issue in discussions on the final selection of partners, was the cultural dimension of assuming that, based on prior collaborations, co-working in FOSTER promised to go smoothly. The selection criteria did not specify the notion of ‘driven by citizens’ to an extent that they turned the academic partners’ gaze towards social movements. Liberatory PAR was not at all at the heart of the project design. Still, it was assumed that the societal partners had a strong footing in civic society. Therefore, to some it came as a surprise to hear one partner remark at the project’s kick-off that they did not work with citizens as “citizens are not a relevant player in food system change” (pers. comm., Brussel, September 21, 2022). Eventually, it became clear that none of the six organizations were as such ‘driven’ by citizens. All six are professional organisations with quite diverse ambitions to contributing to food system change (Prüse et al., 2023). As a senior researcher with a coordinating role in the project regarding its substantive focus, it is part of my task to gear the very diverse project activities together in a way that they ‘add up’ in terms of concretely giving shape jointly to the project’s Theory of Change. With the CDIs not being ‘citizen driven’, we not only had to change the label (‘change-driven initiatives’), but also find ways to meet the DoA’s promises. We took the fact that most of the CDIs operate in relation to specific groups in society (respectively, farmers, small-scale market producers and sellers, policy makers, and urban residents) as a starting point and reframed their role as one of systemic intermediaries (Den Boer et al., 2023). Rather than looking into the exchanges and knowledge flows between academic partners and CDIs, FOSTER now focuses – among other things – on the interactions between these two partners and a ‘third party’. The resulting ‘knowledge flow triangles’ are now at the heart of efforts that CDI partners undertake at designing and implementing concrete activities that suit their agendas and goals as well as that of their ‘third party’ counterparts, curating the agentic power of the latter and themselves into food movement dynamics. Conscious efforts are made to create the conditions required for a reciprocal relationship, ensuring that activities claimed as relevant by one type of partner are also considered relevant by the other partners. 5.1.2. Interand transdisciplinary work as critical recovery? The interactions between the CDIs, their societal partners (‘third party’ groups and individuals) and the academic partner that in the FOSTER context is linked up to these, form a dedicated object of study and reflection in the project. Partners are asked to keep journals to reflect on how these interactions plays out, and notably on what they themselves experience as triggers for self-reflection and learning. Next to record keeping on critical moments in the ‘triangle interactions,’ the process of reflexive monitoring includes ethnographic research in which video is used to capture and feedback perspectives on the nature of the collaborations and barriers therein. Part of reflexive monitoring in action is to do justice to the ambitions, as well as the identity and context of each of the partners involved. This concerns not only the various CDIs, T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 6 which each are rooted in different parts of the EU as well as the food value network, but also the academic partners, which come from different scientific disciplines and cultures. While from a radical food movement perspective, it may seem far-fetched to call the careful balancing act of navigating the various (non-)academic backgrounds a process of critical recovery, it is definitely a process of opening up traditional research routines in many ways, rendering FOSTER an experiment in transdisciplinary innovation towards action-oriented knowledge co-creation. As such, FOSTER explicitly engages with the ‘double transformation’ as discussed in the introduction. The project itself is an experiment in how to transform knowledge creation across epistemological boundaries, in view of food system transformation, probing into the question – in a learning-in-action mode – how the perspectives, knowledges and worldviews of each partner can be best related to one another and translated into actions. This renders the project a highly interesting co-learning journey in transdisciplinarity for all involved. For instance, a forum for knowledge exchange which was initially dubbed ‘Summer school’, implying unidirectional learning (in the FOSTER context on systems thinking), was rephrased as Mutual Learning Network, emphasizing a two-way direction of knowledge flows. 5.1.3. Actionable knowledge for whom? The commitment to work and experiment together that is clearly shared among partners, witness the high turn-out and lively debates at consortium meetings, cannot prevent that interest in what is take up in the project often diverge. The academic partners’ agendas determine by and large the project’s agenda, resulting in a range of requests to CDI partners for input or actions that, to a varying extent, do not reflect their needs or interests. The need to produce ‘Deliverables’ in the shape of reports, to fit the funding requirements, is among the reasons why this is the case: the action-agenda of the CDIs had to be articulated in several research steps, each requiring data collection (surveys, interviews, focus groups) and analysis that meet the quality criteria of proper research. As a result, a returning question among CDIs a year and a half into the project is: ‘what are we supposed to do in the FOSTER context?’, while at times the academic partners even use the word “homework” when describing some activity that they consider of use to the CDIs, making systemic devolution, that is, ensuring that the products of a joint research process take shape in a way that suit all involved, a challenging issue. 5.2. FoodCLIC: transdisciplinary action research project for (city-region) food system transformation The methodological approach of FoodCLIC is transdisciplinary, PARfriendly and corresponds with HE’s Innovative Actions funding framework. Specifically, it centres on multi-stakeholder governance in the form of living labs (Erisman et al., 2023) of innovative real-life interventions in food environments of eight European city-region food systems. This learn-by-doing approach, primarily partners universities with civil society or governmental food policy networks who facilitate a pre-designed series workshops on food system mapping, envisioning, strategy making and co-designing interventions with stakeholders across the quadruple helix (Carayannis & Campbell, 2009). Once the interventions are selected, multi-stakeholder work groups are formed and resourced to implement the interventions with action plans and a budget of approximately € 95,000 per city-region. A series of four action-learning cycles occur over a period of two years of implementation are marked by four reflexive learning and monitoring sessions where action plans can be adapted or ‘innovated’ in light of new insights, opportunities and systemic barriers. This experimental process is accompanied by a Community of Practice for policymakers and planners who are enrolled to join, support and/or learn from the interventions, building socially robust and context-responsive evidence and capacities to institute integrated food policies and food-sensitive planning frameworks. These institutional changes reflect the main goals of FoodCLIC and equate to systemic transformation. Finally, the inclusion of food-deprived and vulnerable groups and deprived urban areas in the intervention design and implementation as well as the promotion of rural-urban interlinkages with farmers in the city-region are key pillars in FoodCLIC’s theoretical framework that are considered necessary to inform and realise integrated food policies and transform incumbent power relations in cityregions. Currently, the project is starting the co-design phase after having completed participatory mapping, envisioning and strategizing workshops for which the author has co-created trainings, guidelines for the living labs and directly participated in the Amsterdam city-region team. FoodCLIC won a call from the European Commission for a ‘HORIZON Innovative Actions’ grant on “integrated urban food system policies – how cities and towns can transform food systems for co-benefits” (CORDIS, 2024). The call derives from and requires alignment with the EU’s Green New Deal priorities and Farm to Fork strategy thereby centring EU political objectives and a vision of “[u]rban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens (including deprived and vulnerable groups)” (ibid). For me, as a PhD researcher already a part of food sovereignty and food justice movements, the FoodCLIC vision triggered critical questions, about the (potential) role of small-scale agroecological farmers living in non-urban environments within a city-region, and about undocumented people in refugee situations who are not legally regarded as citizens: how do they and their supporting food movements fit in, if at all? What if the prospective communities, particularly those with members experiencing multi-dimensional poverty and systemic oppression, have different needs, priorities and strategies that require going beyond a food system approach? Will the design of FoodCLIC only resource the empowerment of communities if they do not deviate from the pre-decided goal of healthy and sustainable food for all, that is, is participation only possible if ‘invited’ (see Section 4)? With a mixture of excitement and anxiety I entered FoodCLIC as a design implementer, aware that it did not start out as a liberatory PAR process. University institutions designed the project and were granted the lead as “project beneficiaries” alongside practice partners from local governmental bodies or civil society organisations. Most salaried workers are enrolled either as living lab researchers or coordinators who have so far been majorly occupied with fulfilling the actions, tasks and deliverables stated in the DoA. Reciprocal participation has been achieved between them, like in FOSTER, they participate in each other’s activities to complete project tasks. However, they very much struggle to find the time to participate in the activities of transformative stakeholders who directly resist and make alternatives to the corporate food regime (McMichael, 2009). This significantly limited trust-building and establishing reciprocal participation, e.g. by participating in their farms, kitchens, community events, open assemblies and political actions. For me, a recurrent question was, if the primary vision, objectives, beneficiaries, and activities are already decided without marginalised food movements, then why not abandon ship? I decided to experiment with the premise that any research collaboration can evolve and be transformed into a PAR process “if there is intention and commitment from the partners” (M´ endez et al., 2017: 9). From prior exchanges and collaborations with community organisations and movements struggling for food justice and food sovereignty in two of the eight participating city-regions, Amsterdam and Barcelona, I knew that they align with the vision of healthy and sustainable food for all and also want system transformation. Beside vision alignment, in FoodCLIC’s design, there is dedicated space and budget, in the later phases of the project, for identifying transformative stakeholders and then re-envisioning, co-deciding strategic objectives as well as a co-designing and implementing systemic interventions in action-learning cycles. In other words, the project design, at least rhetorically, offers openings and resources for radical and progressive food movements to benefit from T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 7 FoodCLIC and potentially apply liberatory PAR, if they participate. How could I contribute in making that a reality? 5.2.1. Nurturing reciprocal relationships In FoodCLIC, my official role is to act as a methodological trainer, guideline co-creator and facilitator of peer-to-peer learning between living lab coordinators and researchers, who I will refer to as systemic intermediaries (den Boer et al., 2023) working for public institutions, food policy networks and/or organisations that are not (yet) part of nor primarily accountable to food movements. I am primarily tasked with supporting them to progress through the project’s phases and organise multi-stakeholder workshops as stated in the DoA. This means I am one step removed from food movements on the ground. My strategy as methodological trainer is that by practicing PAR’s horizontality in the activities I organise with and for systemic intermediaries, they may gain sufficient confidence and motivation to apply PAR with systemically marginalised communities, such as small-scale farmers and low-income migrant neighbourhoods, in the later phases of FoodCLIC. One strategy I employed to that end is ‘equitable listening’ that we practiced in our monthly mutual-support sessions whereby space is made to co-generate learning questions, articulate challenges and requests which are addressed collectively. As a group, we observed that people with least experience in Horizon Europe projects and least fluency in English were participating the least in the sessions. We then redistributed time to extensively listen to their challenges and struggles, deepen understanding and offer support if requested. Periodically asking systemic intermediaries about ‘who is missing and who needs to be involved in the future’ are other effective practices to acknowledge and amend micro-level power relations in the research process. Reflecting on why historically marginalised stakeholders are not part of their networks nor those of the beneficiary universities, supported municipalities and food policy councils fostered recognition of power asymmetries and the identification of strategies to bridge the separation. As trainers, we asked the living lab teams what power inequalities they suspect to be present in a multi-stakeholder setting and what capacities they want to strengthen in themselves to facilitate more equitable outcomes. “Training on anti-racism and institutional whiteness”, “involving participants in design of workshops” and “awareness and responses to power and resource inequalities” were the most popular requests for self-identified external support. This activity generated a lot of empathy and understanding for me. It was not that the systemic intermediaries do not care about addressing power imbalances, it was that they need more life experience and training in countering systems of oppression that persistently divide most of us across lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, culture, legal (migration) status and more. 5.2.2. Shifting the ‘who’ for critical recoveries In the short-term, my approach has been to step out of the trainer role and make direct connections with agroecological farmers and marginalised communities resisting food injustices. I demonstrated that it is possible to meet with groups outside of one’s own network and use the project to directly compensate them with a combination of cash payments, gifts, food vouchers, location hire and in-house catering services. Relationship building required time, but such investments paid off in terms of gaining trust. Refining guidelines was another strategy I experimented with in promoting respectful encounters between systemic intermediaries and food justice-or-sovereignty-oriented organisations. FoodCLIC’s DoA requires that at least half of the real-life interventions (innovative actions) are implemented in urban food environments with a large proportion of food-deprived and vulnerable groups. This gave us the mandate to make guidelines to identify neighbourhoods with systemic disadvantage and do ‘system understanding activities’ with stakeholder groups living and working there. We also refined the requirement of FoodCLIC to involve the ‘quadruple helix’ in stakeholder engagement to guide towards progressive and radical food initiatives. CSA farms and food-consumer cooperatives were highlighted as examples of the business and industry category, which we specified to include local food producers and entrepreneurs who provide food to deprived and vulnerable groups. We clarified that social movements are part of the civil society category and requested direct representation of food-deprived and vulnerable groups. 8 The guidelines for the ‘mapping activities’ contained a common mapping method to listen to their understanding of the root causes of unhealthy and exclusive food environments and their ideas for future interventions. This made space for the practice of critical recovery, recognising and building on what is valued and works from the respected communities instead of importing culturally inappropriate innovations from elsewhere. Nonetheless, the guidelines made a small contribution to shifting the stakeholder mix and forms of participation. In practice, most of the living lab researchers and coordinators were overwhelmed with the quantity of mapping tasks required from the project design. They struggled to meet deadlines to fill in templates enabling ‘Deliverable’ reports to be made. Their wish to experiment with creative and participatory methodologies such as photovoice and work with neighbourhoods’ archives and artists to remember local heroes and revitalise past successes (critical recovery) before articulating shared visions and strategies was frustrated by a lack of time or freedom from the demanding task requirements. 5.2.3. Struggling to produce creative forms of actionable knowledge In the making of guidelines for ‘mapping and gapping’ we recommended experimentation with photovoice because it is transformable and multi-purpose. Creative audio-visual processes, such as photovoice can transport lived experiences and demands of marginalised stakeholders into policy-making contexts in accessible, self-representing and affective ways. Such creative knowledge forms can be transformed and multi-purposed into exhibitions, websites, social media, and fundraising material much more readily, than a lengthy report. Even though it felt impossible to reverse the dominance of formal written reports 9 as the primary deliverables of FoodCLIC, it has proven worthwhile to struggle for more creative and dynamic forms of output, that are valued by many and potentially serve as launch pads for actions, plans and strategies for systemic change. One effective strategy to counter the predominance of written reports, was to encourage participatory drawing of food visions by making it part of a training for systemic intermediaries to facilitate a visioning workshop. Part of the training and workshop budgets could fund artists to make the outlines of neighbourhood, municipal and city-region foodscapes to which participants added their own ideas and drawings depicting envisioned changes by 2050. This creative and playful form of knowledge-making enabled different relations among the stakeholders. Gradually, as systemic intermediaries listened to the knowledge preferences of civil society and food movement representatives, they realised there was a need for knowledge products that are multi-media friendly, affective, artistic, and accessible for non-academics to analyse and make use of autonomously. For example, when small-scale farmers were centred in a FoodCLIC intervention pathway in Amsterdam, a documentary was proposed and selected as well as farmer-to-farmer workshops as part of the action plan. These creative knowledge forms or products were strategically chosen to serve as a basis for strengthening cooperative relations across farms, making the basis for a course 8 ‘Deprived and vulnerable groups’ are identity-markers chosen by the EU call and adopted in the FoodCLIC project design as target groups. These markers are not used by food justice and food sovereignty movements, nor the resilient people who are made vulnerable or experience poverty due to systemic oppressions. 9 15 out of 35 of FoodCLIC deliverables are written reports, only 2 out of 35 have an audio-visual component, namely videos and vlogs of effective solutions. T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 8 for new farmers, and an advocacy tool to overcome precarious land rights and mobilise public policy support. Ultimately, it is latter stages of the project which promise to afford more space to practice liberatory PAR. It is currently too early to outline to what extent FoodCLIC’s goals of inclusive food system governance and integrated food-policy making have been achieved. The current phase of the project design requires the co-designing of interventions which must contain knowledge and communication actions to work on jointly in heterogenous collectives that could cross class, gender, racial, cultural and vocational divides as was typical of original manifestations of liberatory PAR (Rappaport, 2020). The guidelines require the inclusion of marginalised and transformative stakeholders to decide what they want to achieve, do and make (systemic devolution) and budget is available to fairly compensate their labour. Nonetheless, building the trust between food movements and public institutions and navigating the bureaucracy of ethical approvals and financial administration is very challenging. Furthermore, I observe and recognise the humongous workload of the living lab coordinators and researchers, who are primarily implementing the core tasks of project’s design and filling in data so report-based deliverables can be submitted within deadlines. I have felt obliged to be very careful in asking or even encouraging them to do more than what is already prescribed on a highly ambitious and demanding Description of Action. I try to leverage the privilege of time I have in my role as trainer by distributing energy to participate in the critical recovery and recognition of local histories, herstories, and role-models, past and present, from marginalised yet resilient communities who achieved some degree of liberation and transformation in their lives where food have also played an enabling role. At this early stage in the project, it remains an open question if the FoodCLIC project can be effectively harnessed to make space and share resources for marginalised community organisations who strive for progressive and radical visions such as food justice and food sovereignty. This would be observable if they play a key role in deciding what (systemic) interventions will be implemented in their lived food environments, in which ways and with which knowledges and outputs. In a multi-stakeholder governance process that primarily partners with systemic intermediaries who are not (yet) aligned and experienced in sharing power with such community organisations, such emancipatory possibilities are far from guaranteed in practice. To do so requires consistent intention and attention to micro-transformations in micropower relations to which liberatory PAR is significantly useful. What has been effective so far, is the recovery of the critical ‘who’ of PAR by combining aforementioned strategies to enable members of marginalised and resistant communities to join the project before a decisive moment of re-design and resource distribution. This was possible by building sensitizing capacities with systemic intermediaries and supporting conditions for some protagonists of food justice and sovereignty movements to join the stakeholder mix as prospective co-designers of interventions in their own lived environments with a budget to realize actions that correspond with their life goals. 6. Discussion and recommendations This article explores how a reinvigoration of PAR’s roots is possible in projects that were not designed initially in line with the original guiding concepts of liberatory PAR. The motivation to investigate this is that Western European universities repeatedly fail to make partnerships with progressive and radical food movements. That is the case even though a major funder like the EU increasingly encourages active collaboration between academic researchers and civic counterparts in participatory (action) research. In view of fundamentally transforming the food system, the ‘who’ of PAR is ever so critical. Knowledge coconstruction with partners in progressive and radical food movements based on reciprocal participation has proved an effective strategy to working towards food system transformation. The two projects described here did not start out as PAR and offer ground for reflection on the question to which extent and how it is possible to exercise agency and devise strategies to start building relations with such partners. A comparison between the experiences in the projects show that, firstly, it is possible to redefine project tasks into codesigning and/or implementing research activities with ‘vulnerable’ groups. Yet, secondly, clearly, depending on project design and objectives, the possibilities to do so vary greatly. Comparatively, the FoodCLIC project afforded more opportunities for reciprocal participation because there was budget allocated for marginalised food system actors (here: small-scale agroecology farmers and racialised migrants with lowincome) to be compensated for their knowledge and participation in decision-making activities, as well as approximately € 95.000 for each city-region to realize innovative actions not prefigured in the project’s design. Still, reciprocal participation with civic movements was significantly limited in both projects. FOSTER’s original aspirations for partnership with citizen-driven initiatives was curtailed because of the relatively tight knit network in which calls for EU-funded research are received and read, and in which the search for further partners took shape. Time pressure to have all partners on board before the deadline for proposal submission, was a major incentive to search for potential partners in the academic initiators’ regular circle of contacts, notably looking for known and hence trusted partners already in possession of a ‘code’ (the PIC) by which to legitimately enter the submission portal. This happened in spite of the list of criteria drafted by which to select citizen-driven initiative. Similarly, in FoodCLIC, despite making a guideline for direct representation of food-deprived groups, such representation failed mostly because the project design did not account for the additional time and care that is needed to build solidary relations that are new to the systemic intermediaries and the institutional network which employs them. In both projects, the exhaustion of university researchers’ hours allocated to pre-designed project tasks prevented them from meaningfully participating in the activities and/or activism of radical and progressive food movements. As a consequence, participation remains a majorly a unidirectional affair that too easily becomes extractive. In the occasions, where systemic intermediaries were already part of food movements or had the mandate to do ethnographic research, reciprocal participation was more attainable and liberatory partnerships are developing as both projects continue unfolding. The experiences with the FOSTER and FoodCLIC projects speak to discussions on Mendez et al.’s (2017) assertion that any research process can be transformed into a liberatory PAR process when there is intention and commitment from the partners. Indeed, PAR requires a willingness from institutionally powerful partners to share control of the research process with those who are historically and/or currently marginalized and excluded by the very institutions within we, as academics, work. Still, the historical sketch of EU funding schemes intent on enabling and stimulating societal actors’ participation in research casts doubt on whether mere intentions suffice. Even the intentions explicated in the act by which the HE funding programme is set up cannot prevent that in the actual practice of our projects, we struggle to include, let alone partner with, marginalised communities and food movement organisations. Next to the hesitance to share epistemological and agenda-setting power, practical barriers stand in the way. In principle it is possible for any of these organisations to become project partners once they are registered as a legal entity. However, in practice, they remain dependent on a mediating institution to stand a chance at becoming partners from the beginning and thus be able to hold the pen when designing a project proposal. Furthermore, apart from institutional-administrative barriers, direct representation of people experiencing food insecurity or poverty is hampered by a fear of re-stigmatising, given the ethical clearance required which, we found in FoodCLIC, acted as a social and bureaucratic deterrent. Such barriers imply that the direct participation of social (food) movements and marginalized communities is highly dependent on ‘benevolent’ intermediaries, such as ourselves as researchers, or other societal partners (like the CDIs in FOSTER and the municipalities and T.S. Jones and A.M.C. Loeber Journal of Responsible Technology 20 (2024) 100100 9