This article is supported by CIAT

[BOGOTÁ] In the transition region between the Colombian Andes and Amazon, a collaborative research pilot known as a living lab is helping build peace.

The living lab is a space where local people are collaborating with researchers to create knowledge together in order to strengthen regional governance, helping fill an institutional void left in the wake of the armed conflict that wracked the country since the 1960s.

“This idea has its origin in the expectations generated with the signing of the Peace Agreement, which for many people participating in this process meant the hope of having a future by themselves,” Luz Ángela Rodríguez, assistant professor at the Xavierian Pontifical University in central Colombia, tells SciDev.Net.

The university, along with a joint venture between Biodiversity International & CIAT, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, in Colombia, has been running a pilot living lab since 2023 in the municipality of La Montañita, in the eastern Colombian region of Caquetá, where the Andes morphs into the Amazon.

Its objective is to offer governance alternatives to relieve pressure on forests and contribute to the construction of peace.

“The goal is to identify, build and plan from bottom-to-up and, hopefully, test innovations to make food systems more sustainable,” Rodríguez says.

Caquetá is a region deeply affected by the armed internal conflict that has ravaged Colombia since 1964 and its forests are crucial for the country’s emissions reduction efforts.

Communities in the region continue to struggle against violence as a number of dissident rebel groups remain active, despite the 2016 peace agreement signed between the Colombian government and FARC guerillas.

“The reconfiguration of violence in the territories has put this at great risk,” says Rodríguez.

Almost three quarters of the region is covered in forest, and the department has one of the highest deforestation rates in the country, where the conversion of natural forest to pasture represents 84 per cent of the department’s total emissions.

As a result, the group chose to work with livestock and cocoa producers, explains Martha Vanegas, coordinator of the living labs project, called Living laboratories for people (LL4P).

“[The approach] promotes individual empowerment through reflexive processes where participants take decisions and use the resources for their benefit,” says Vanegas, a scientist dedicated to forest and nature conservation, specialising in policies and society at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands.

For example, LL4P promotes networks of local farmers and organizations that can connect producers and consumers.

The pilot laboratory in La Montañita seeks to ensure that residents and producers benefit from their own food resources and reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. Credit: Courtesy of the Faculty of Environmental and Rural Studies, Pontifical Javerian University, Colombia.

Living labs are spaces where citizens, research organizations, businesses, cities and regions interact under the same conditions. At the same time, they are spaces where participants can create prototypes quickly and deploy innovations.

The initiative emphasizes the importance of ideas rooted in the local context to take advantage of the population’s capabilities, Vanegas explains.

“Participatory and multi-actor approaches, such as living laboratories, have the potential to help us achieve the necessary changes, while we work on local development objectives,” Vanegas adds.

Gregorio Rodríguez, director of the farming organization Agrosolidaria La Montañita, tells SciDev.Net that the experience has been “very fruitful” in protecting their land.

He explains that the proposals have been debated, studied and carried forward by consensus with the community, taking into account the academic value as well as the wisdom of producers.

“This has led us to feel pleasantly recognized in this project that takes into account these two educational models, empirical knowledge and professional, academic knowledge,” he tells SciDev.Net.

Living labs are now operating across low- and middle-income countries, including Kenya, Vietnam and Colombia, covering topics including health, innovation, food security and even governance and public policy.

For Miguel Sierra, an innovation expert at the National Institute for Agrarian Innovation (INIA) of Uruguay, the disconnect that often exists between researchers and users “requires these spaces to meet, process points of view, demonstrate value propositions in operation and together define strengths and aspects to improve”.

At the INIA they are currently working on a living lab on digitalization and agriculture issues, creating an open space where companies or start-ups that have digital solutions can validate them or verify their value proposition.

The project, called Converge, is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the National Research and Innovation Agency of Uruguay.

“The IDB suggested that the proposals come at a prototype stage at least, and that they offer solutions related to climate change,” Sierra explains. “It is a space for joint validation.”

Currently, there are living labs promoted by organizations across the world, such as the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) which works on health and territory issues in several countries in Africa and Asia.

“In this case, living labs are … open spaces for discussion and creation with communities,” Erwan Sachet, coordinator of a work component of the CIRAD project, tells SciDev.Net.

“Local problems are discussed directly with scientists and then experiments, innovations or interventions are carried out with the communities that respond directly to their problems.”

Ouléye Ka, who lives in Keur Momar Sarr, a municipality in northern Senegal, and is part of the Living Laboratory of Health and Territory, says that this has allowed him to connect with people who helped him discover crucial aspects of the health of nearby Lake Guiers.

“This living laboratory has allowed us to understand that the lake is in danger of degradation in the short term,” he tells SciDev.Net.

“Although the focus has been on the health of the lake, we have raised other issues, such as the safety of property and people, animal mobility, energy quality and agricultural practices, among others.”

According to researcher Rodríguez, the laboratory’s experience in Colombia has the potential to be applied in other Amazonian countries and even other regions of the world.

“Through this experience, we can contribute to a reflection on the role of the academy in strengthening local processes, which are born of the initiative of the communities and [which] we try to approach respectfully to contribute our methodological and conceptual tools,” she explains.

In citizen science, as well as in other forms of participatory research, the academy interacts with people to provide solutions to specific problems. Credit: Serfor/Perú, (public domain image).

“Although we cannot say that it is a pure process of participatory action research, we are trying to use participatory tools and achieve a dialogue,” says Rodríguez.

Quetzalcoátl Orozco, farming specialist and researcher at the Institute of Geography of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, highlights the importance of this type of initiative, which is part of participatory research, along with other better-known ones, such as citizen science.

“What has been found is that technologies developed outside the contexts where they are going to be applied generally do not work,” says Orozco.

However, he recognizes that one of the main obstacles that participatory research faces is in scaling up the process.

“When it comes to putting them into practice, a very specialized, very dedicated work team is required,” Orozco tells SciDev.Net. “This makes it difficult to spread this type of initiative.”

This article is supported by CIAT.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Latin American and the Caribbean desk.