Steering group of the transdisciplinary process

The steering group is a small group of members from civil society associations and researchers. It is in charge of preparing the annual workshops and it is the heart of the transdisciplinary process.

The first meetings served the purpose of exploring the degree of availability and involvement of the different initiatives interested in the process. A core group was established around the theme “food transition” to explore different ways forward, including brainstorming ideas for a more formal platform that could be established later on and thinking of structures, hosted within the university but co-led with non-academic actors, that could be developed to foster actor-researcher partnerships and transdisciplinary activities. During 2015, this was later decided to be the Chantier de la Transition, which merged into Louvain Partnership Research on Ecological and Social Transition (LPTransition).

Within the context of LPTransition, different collective intelligence methodologies were employed, including world café and speed dating activities, to facilitate interactions and exchanges between researchers, PhD students, post-docs, and social actors involved in initiatives related to the transformation of the food system. During this phase, results from parallel research projects Food4Sustainability and Food4Gut were also presented to the organizations who participated in the first part of the projects.