A Living Laboratory Producing Agroecological Knowledge Since the 1960s: The Comarca Andina of North Patagonia, Argentina

Abstract

Living Labs (LLs) are often described as top-down, formally designed innovation spaces, and literature about LL research highlights scarce reports of LLs in Latin America. However, grassroots territorial-innovation spaces exist in Latin America, and we hypothesized that some of them probably agree with the LL framework. The Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42 (CAP42), located in north Patagonia, Argentina, has already seen the emergence of agroecology and organic farming in the 1960s. We considered the CAP42 as a case study for our research. We applied a multidisciplinary approach combining socio-cultural and environmental assessment at the landscape level. We revealed that interacting institutional and cultural factors have shaped the region into a site of agroecological co-innovation, and that agroecological innovation and knowledge co-creation have emerged as bottom-up, non-formalized, long-term process. The assessment of environmental indicators (forest cover loss, land use-related changes of soil properties, etc.) provided evidence for the sustainability of the CAP42 landscape. Forest cover loss observed in the last two decades (2000–2023) was mainly linked to fires rather than agricultural expansion or intensive livestock production. The CAP42 covers the three-layer network approach and place defined in the LL framework, as it is a real-world learning and innovation space enabling multi-actor co-development of context-specific solutions, through multiple forms of knowledge co-creation that align with current LL definitions. It also illustrates that sustainable, long-lasting LLs may result from historically constructed conditions, providing key insights for the development of future LLs.