Mendez, Pablo F.

The current rate of agricultural soils degradation worldwide is turning soil health and its sustainable management a research frontier and focus of global concern. In the European Union, an estimated 60-70% of agricultural soils are considered unhealthy for food production as a direct result of unsustainable practices, compounded by increasing extreme climate events and biodiversity loss. This paper tackles two fundamental epistemological challenges that soil health, a relatively newcomer in soil science, still faces, hindering wider and urgent sustainability transformations and pathways. On the one hand, the lack of robust approaches quantitatively linking soil health status with soil ecological functions, creates vagueness for determining locally-adapted combinations of sustainable crop-livestock farming practices. On the other hand, such vagueness embeds into larger social-ecological dynamic uncertainties related to the governance of soil health innovations and their diffusion processes. The general challenge here is how to spark local cooperation for navigating landscape-level transformations in traditional cultural settings and contexts characterized by: (1) intricate and diverse combinations of value-chain, industrial, financial and political interests, values and beliefs across multiple policy domains; (2) institutional inertia creating both sectoral and system-level lock-ins, self-reinforcing situations where opportunity and potential for change gets minimized. Here, I present a diagnostic multi-functional approach, tested with local communities from five European agricultural Living Labs, to co-design place-based governance models for steering adaptive innovation processes in complex social-ecological contexts affected by lock-in phenomena. The approach operates under agroecological tenets and a regenerative paradigm, conceived as a desired outcome of transformative processes. The theoretical framework underlying the diagnostic approach combines elements from hybrid governance models, with a conceptual core based on Ostromian commons-protective principles. The latter aid participants in exploring an understanding of soil ecosystems and resources as a commons, instead of a black box under our feet linked to the land property regime.