Building a Movement Ecosystem Capable of Transforming the Food System (Pt 3)

By Ali Taherzadeh

This three-part series explores what it could mean to build a diverse, complex, and interconnected movement around food, farming, and land in the UK. The ideas are rooted in Ali Taherzadeh's doctoral research on the UK agroecology movement and shaped by a range of contemporary movement organisers and thinkers. This work feeds into the Movement Strategy Process with Shared Assets and Navigate Coop, which is facilitating a collective of organisations in the movement to work together on movement-level strategy.

Part 3

What does it mean to learn a new food and land system? Our current destructive and unsustainable system has been learnt, by many people over many decades - learning new industrial techniques and chemicals, learning ways of relating to food that became embedded in our social fabric, and learning worldviews that separate us from the land. But it can, and needs to be, unlearnt. In its place we need to learn new practices, frameworks, and dynamics to create the future we want, where human and non-human life can flourish.

As discussed in Part 2, the previous blog in this series, learning is sometimes overlooked as an important aspect of how we organise ourselves in social movements. But it is a critical part of social movement praxis - the ongoing reflection on action, which feeds back into renewed action. If we're going to be successful, it is important to pay attention to how we foster different types of learning in our movements and be intentional about it.

Why are collective learning practices important for agroecology?

Social learning is a key way we bring agroecology to scale - increasing the number and diversity of people putting its principles into practice and embedding them in different places and structures. Firstly, there is the learning required to develop and scale alternatives - different economic models, agricultural practices, or organising models - which often requires practical, hands-on learning: trying things out, seeing them for yourself, adapting to context.

Secondly, we need to develop the movement's "cognitive praxis" - the shifts in consciousness that bring about new ways of relating to food, land, and ecosystems, shaping new discourses and a collective identity that strengthens our collective action. This involves unlearning dominant oppressive worldviews and understanding diverse realities, so our movement is grounded in justice and equity.

Finally, there is the learning that happens as we plan, organise, and reflect together - how do we organise in a way that learns from divergent voices? Where are the weaknesses and opportunities in the current food and land system? Do our actions reflect the way we believe change happens? Learning is critical to both constructing new food and land systems and deconstructing the ones we oppose.

Horizontal (peer-to-peer) learning has been used across the global agroecology movement to create wide-reaching change. Campesino-a-campesino (peasant to peasant, CaC) is one of the most established methodologies for scaling out agroecological practices, first implemented in Cuba and Nicaragua and spread through networks like La Via Campesina. Rooted in Freirean popular education, it centres on farmers collectively identifying shared challenges and choosing solutions to try, often after seeing a peer's good practice with their own eyes - building confidence and social networks, rather than transferring knowledge top-down from experts.

Here in the UK we see plenty of peer-to-peer learning too, at events like the Land Skills Fair and Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC), farm tours, and regional grain and fibre networks. But horizontality alone does not mean learning practices are capable of producing transformative change.

What does transformative agroecology learning look like?

Scholars Colin Anderson, Chris Maughan and Michel Pimbert studied European agroecology movements and identified four interdependent "pillars" of transformative agroecology learning: horizontal learning; diálogo de saberes (dialogue between different ways of knowing); combining political and practical learning; and building multi-scale social movement networks. Together, these connect the practice of agroecology with the political project of food sovereignty.

In my own research of the UK movement, I found horizontality in learning was strong in many spaces, with a culture of democratising and commoning knowledge. Farm Hack is a particularly good example. As one organiser puts it,

"Farm hack brings a lot of the learning and philosophy and capacity of [the open-source] community into the agroecological farming space, and that whole political program of trying to create an alternative to the enclosures of ideas."

Creating spaces for horizontal learning is about decommodifying knowledge and bringing people together to co-produce it. This has the potential to build confidence, challenge hierarchies, and deepen social networks.

In parts of the movement, practical knowledge was often combined with political knowledge - and this is critical, because agroecology isn't just a set of farming techniques, it's a political project for food sovereignty. Still, many spaces keep the focus on technical knowledge alone, limiting transformative potential, as agroecological practices simply get swapped in for conventional ones with no real change to how farms and food systems are organised. 

While the number of movement spaces addressing political aspects of agroecology has grown a lot in the last few years, this isn’t always combined with practical knowledge. In some larger events like Oxford Real Farming Conference, the practical, technical content can almost become its own stream separate to political and justice-oriented sessions. So, while they both exist they aren’t necessarily integrated or attended by the same people which can limit the opportunities for diverse and conflicting perspectives to come into dialogue with each other. As I explain later on, big events like ORFC do still hold an important role in movement learning though.

Diálogo de saberes is where there is potential for more work. Diálogo de saberes is about challenging the dominance of Western, corporate, and scientific ways of knowing, recognising that many valid ways of knowing the world exist and can be brought into conversation without one dominating. It is central to La Vía Campesina's organising. 

While the UK movement often creates spaces for dialogue between different alternative practices like organic and biodynamic, and between different professions or roles, such as farmers and researchers, critical dialogue is often missing between agroecological landworkers and mainstream, more conventional farmers. As one Farm Hack organiser put it, "it seems very few sort of normal farmers, industrialised farmers, if any" attend movement events. One grower and regional organiser felt ORFC was like "preaching to the choir" with organisations "talking to themselves" rather than to the farmers who most need to change. In the years since I carried out my research this has been shifting, with more interaction with the parallel but conventional Oxford Farming Conference and, in general, in the movement through events like Groundswell.

The relative absence of dialogue with more conventional farmers impacts the potential for more systemic transformation. In contrast, where campesino-a-campesino has driven transformation at scale, contact between agroecological and conventional farmers in the same region is central to how change spreads. Without these kinds of interactions, as one arable farmer I interviewed put it, "you just see tunnel vision, blinkers". The exchange runs both ways too - agroecological landworkers have plenty to learn from experienced conventional farmers. As one action learning group member reflected, we too easily get "caught in people being good and bad, in the right camp and the wrong camp," when there's real room for "cross-pollination."

One of the reasons dialogue is less present is because it isn't always comfortable. One farmer transitioning from conventional arable production described a turning point that came through conflict with an organic farmer in a facilitated online session: "if I'd seen her in person at an event or in a webinar I'd have walked off... but because we were put in a breakout room, we actually had a chat and we met in the middle... it was uncomfortable, but sometimes it takes that". That thirty seconds of discomfort became part of a bigger shift - he moved into mixed farming and away from artificial fertilisers. Dialogue between ways of knowing doesn't require agreement but it does require a container sturdy enough to hold disagreement without becoming a stalemate, or a walkout.

This is why the fourth pillar, building multi-scale (and multi-actor) networks, is what makes the other three possible at scale. While there are various efforts to create spaces for horizontal learning between different perspectives and knowledges, to enable systemic change we need strong and interconnected networks at local, regional, and national levels, including those that bring together different identities, different sectors, professions and more. Campesino-a-campesino methodology, for instance, relies on big established networks between local groups embedded in communities, with clear roles to facilitate and coordinate exchanges at different scales across a country or region. This comes back to the idea discussed in Part 1, the first blog, of a movement ecosystem composed of diverse and interconnected spaces, some which feel more like home and some involving more challenging coalitions. Building on this, we can start to think about the different kinds of learning needed for system transformation and which spaces can facilitate that.  

Entry, deepening, and transformative-transgressive learning

So, beyond these four pillars, my research suggested another useful distinction: between types of learning, based on what they achieve and where they best happen. I call these entry, deepening, and transformative-transgressive learning.

Entry learning is the first introduction to new practices and ideas - talks, demonstrations, farm tours at events like the Land Skills Fair or ORFC. It matters because it's how new people enter the movement. It works best in larger, more heterogeneous spaces, and needs spaces to feel genuinely welcoming by being aware of how strong group identities and insider language easily tip into feeling cliquey to outsiders, even unintentionally.

Deepening learning happens once someone has a foothold: developing practices further and embedding them in a particular place and culture - moving from general interest in, say, agroforestry, to working out how it applies to their own soil and markets. It relies on far more commonality than entry learning, thriving in smaller home spaces - farm tours, peer groups, niche communities like the UK Organic Market Gardeners Facebook group. A highland sheep farmer, for instance, found little relevant in solutions from lowland peers. What it needs most is time and relationships. Farmers spoke about friendships that "enable deeper learning". Agroecology is place-embedded, and deepening learning has to reflect that.

Transformative-transgressive learning or T-learning is the hardest of the three. It is about transforming underlying perspectives rather than adding skills, about recognising systemic inequities or unlearning assumptions about "good farming" or “good food”. This is what makes agroecology genuinely political and able to create systemic change rather than a set of techniques bolted onto the same power structures. It can happen in more homogeneous groups - anti-racism training within a small group - or through the friction of heterogeneous groups, where people with very different starting points challenge each other's sense of what's possible.

Above all, it needs trust and skilful facilitation - what many now refer to as "brave spaces" rather than "safe spaces", since genuine dialogue on contentious topics always involves discomfort. It takes courage and recognition that there is likely fear on both sides - of judgement, of being invalidated, of one’s position or safety being at risk. Building strong containers to allow difficult conversations to happen means they are more likely to result in learning that transforms our perspectives and transgresses the current status quo.

	Entry	Deepening	Transformative- Transgressive
Aim	Introduction to practice and ideas, motivating continued participation	Developing practices, embedding in place and movement culture	Transforming perspectives, transgressing social norms and structures
Spaces	Coalition spaces and home spaces (diversity in experience)	Home spaces (commonality and relevance)	Home and coalition spaces (diversity of perspectives)
Dynamics	Welcoming, accessible language	Shared aims, solidarity, trust	Brave spaces, skilful facilitation

What this means for scaling agroecology

These three types map onto how we scale agroecology: scaling out (more people and places), scaling up (into policy and institutions), and scaling deep (shifting underlying culture and values). Entry learning drives scaling out and scaling up by bringing people into the movement and exposing policymakers to agroecological ideas. Deepening learning contributes to all three, building the grounded examples that then inform institutional change and root practice in place. Transformative-transgressive learning ensures all of these challenge inequity rather than multiplying the status quo - keeping scaling out inclusive, scaling up resistant to co-optation, and driving the cultural transformation needed to replace an industrial food system with something built on different values.

Building a movement for transformative learning

Learning threads through everything this series has explored: the health of our movement ecosystem, the coalitions we build, and now, how we grow our collective capacity for transformation. Entry, deepening, and transformative-transgressive learning cycle into and depend on each other, and different movement spaces - some more home, some more coalition, as explored in Parts 1 and 2 - are suited to fostering different kinds.

Being intentional means asking: what role does this space play? Somewhere to first encounter alternative ideas, somewhere to refine and embed practice, or somewhere to be genuinely challenged? When organisations collaborate to build new spaces for specific audiences they can create coalition spaces of learning without compromising their own home spaces. Different organisations already serve as different kinds of homes - Groundswell and the Soil Association's conference go deep on regenerative and organic practice, ORFC offers a broader introduction, and groups like Pasture for Life or the Nature Friendly Farming Network suit different farmers' starting points.

If we want agroecology to spread beyond the movement's existing bubble - genuinely transforming, not just replacing, our food, farming, and land systems - we need to keep building the connective tissue between these spaces: multi-scale, multi-actor learning networks that hold both the safety of home and the productive discomfort of coalition. That is the work of building a movement ecosystem capable of transformation - not one organisation doing everything, but a diverse, interconnected ecology strong enough, together, to unlearn the food system we have and learn the one we need.