Program Description

This year, we are piloting a Global Agroecological Leadership program that aims to strengthen the role of university-based agroecologists in just transformations within Food Systems. The program is designed to foster collective leadership and the capacity for scholars to most effectively leverage their position within universities to contribute to territorial processes and global movements.

Context: 

Co-creating knowledge is essential for agroecology and food systems transformation. Yet, embedding participatory and transdisciplinary approaches within academic and research institutions remains a major challenge. These approaches require fundamentally different ways of knowing and working—often at odds with institutional norms rooted in hierarchy, disciplinary silos, and extractive research practices. Advancing them demands not just institutional reform, but also individual and cultural change within scholarly communities, alongside strategic investment in the leadership, skills, and capacities needed to drive transformative research and learning from within.

Program Goals: 

This leadership program aims to catalyze change from within academic and research institutions by nurturing co-leadership among emerging and mid-career researchers. It offers a space for collective learning and action, embedded in a supportive global network. Rather than reinforcing dominant models of leadership—individualistic, hierarchical, and shaped by business or academic norms—this program advances an agroecological vision rooted in democracy, participation, and collective transformation.

This leadership program focuses on cultivating the inner and collective capacities of early and intermediate-career (postdoctoral stage or later) researchers and educators in higher education, responding to the repeated need to foster a generation of scholars that can engage with agroecology from a holistic perspective (economic, political, cultural, social, economic, conscious), adopt a transdisciplinary approach (approach research and teaching as a dialogue of knowledges) and that are skilled at working with farmers, NGOs and social movements. 

Ultimately, this program supports leaders not only to be more effective within institutions and research/knowledge spaces, but also to embody and spark the deeper cultural shifts needed to align knowledge systems with the values of justice, ecology, and transformation.

Participation will strengthen each fellow’s ability to advance agroecology through their research, teaching, and leadership roles—while grounding their work in a global network of solidarity, care, and shared learning. Together, we aim to challenge institutional constraints and co-create the knowledge needed for just food system transitions.

The Development Year: A Participatory Action Research Approach

This first year involves a collaborative process to co-create this leadership program. We will all work together to simultaneously build our leadership capacities, while co-creating a leadership program that can be implemented in subsequent years. Together, we will co-develop and launch the inaugural year of the Global Leadership Program, effectively becoming its first cohort. Anchored by an initial framework and supported through a facilitated, participatory process, we will “build the ship as we sail it”—co-creating the program through shared learning and collective action

Research/Learning objectives: 

• Identify and articulate the core domains of leadership for agroecological academic leadership.
• Build out an understanding of the key competencies and skills, along with the pedagogical approaches to influencing our institutions.
• Map out the barriers, along with the strategies and approaches, advancing agroecology in universities along with the methods and approaches.
• Develop a shared analysis of how to build power inside and outside of academia to advance just transformations.
• To build out each of our own plans for agroecological leadership in solidarity and community with the cohort.

Anticipated outcomes:

• Initial basis for 11 modules on leadership to be built into the curriculum for the Global Leaders Program
• One collectively written journal article.
• A certificate of completion for all participants and added to the map and network of Agroecological co-leaders (i.e. alumni of the program).
• Joy, friendship, learning and opportunities for collaboration with cohort members.

Program Facilitators

Curriculum Facilitators: Colin R. Anderson, with Ernesto Mendez, Amaya Carrasco-Torrontegui and Faris Ahmed

Participatory Research Component Lead: Amaya Carrasco-Torrontegui

Coordination Lead: Faris Ahmed

Course Participants