Newsletter
For decades, European agriculture has lived in a strange paradox. Everyone agrees that farmers are central to our food systems, to rural life, to soil and water management, and to climate resilience. Yet when it comes to innovation projects meant to support them, farmers often appear only at the very end of the process: invited to a workshop, asked to validate a tool, or used as a test site for a solution already decided elsewhere.
The European Commission knows this problem well. It has seen too many projects ending with polished reports and sophisticated prototypes that never make it into the hands of the people who need them most. This is exactly why the Multi-Actor Approach (MAA) was introduced — first in Horizon 2020 and now reinforced in Horizon Europe and the CAP’s AKIS framework. But despite appearing in so many call texts, MAA is still one of the least understood concepts in EU project design.
So what is it really about? And why does it matter so deeply for agriculture?
The Multi-Actor Approach: More than a Requirement, a Philosophy
At its core, the Multi-Actor Approach is built around a simple but radical idea:
Innovation should not be designed for farmers. It should be designed with them — from the first conversation to the final result.
EU guidance describes multi-actor projects as those that start from real problems or opportunities faced by end-users and that combine scientific, practical, and experiential knowledge throughout the entire journey. But behind the bureaucratic definitions lies something more human: a shift in power, voice, and agency.
The approach insists that farmers, advisors, researchers, SMEs, cooperatives, NGOs, and public authorities must work as equal partners, not as hierarchical layers where scientists decide, companies implement, and farmers adapt. The knowledge farmers hold — knowledge earned through seasons, failures, and soil under their nails — is not an add-on. It is essential.
This is the interactive innovation model promoted by EIP-AGRI, by AKIS, and increasingly by Cluster 6. It’s not a new funding instrument; it’s a new way of doing innovation.
Why Agriculture Needs the Multi-Actor Approach More Than Any Other Sector
Agriculture is not a controlled laboratory or a predictable factory line. It is a living, breathing system shaped by weather, markets, local traditions, regulatory pressure, and hundreds of daily decisions made under uncertainty. And yet, for years, innovation has too often followed a linear path: researchers identify a problem, develop a solution, and then try to transfer it to farmers.
The result? Adoption rates remain low, frustrations rise on all sides, and promising solutions gather dust because they simply don’t fit the reality on the ground.
Farmers bear all the risk
When a new technology or practice fails, it is not the researcher or the policymaker who loses money, time, or yield — it’s the farmer. No wonder so many innovations are greeted with scepticism.
Context matters — more than outsiders realise
A solution that works on a demonstration farm may collapse when faced with steep slopes, limited labour availability, fragmented plots, or crops grown under strict regional rules. Farmers know these constraints intimately; they navigate them every day.
Social acceptance is impossible without farmer ownership
From digital tools to agroecological transitions, from biotechnology to soil carbon monitoring, every innovation touches public concerns about food, environment, and rural life. When farmers are not part of the narrative, the public’s trust — and farmers’ trust — erodes.
The Multi-Actor Approach, then, is not a decorative EU ideal. It is an answer to repeated, structural failures of top-down agricultural innovation.
What True Co-Creation Looks Like
A genuine multi-actor project does not begin with a perfect proposal drafted in a back office. It begins with a conversation — sometimes messy, sometimes surprising — in which farmers, advisors, and researchers articulate problems from their own perspectives.
A dairy farmer might explain that a proposed animal welfare solution is unworkable during calving season. A cooperative may point out that a novel practice conflicts with existing market requirements. An advisor may highlight unseen labour burdens or compliance risks.
In these early exchanges, something crucial happens: the project becomes anchored in reality.
From here, the partnership evolves. Farmers don’t simply “participate” — they help shape the work: which pilots to run, which fields to use, which indicators matter, and which trade-offs are acceptable. Researchers adapt methodologies to real-world constraints. Companies adjust tools based on on-farm trials. Advisors facilitate, translate, and troubleshoot. And throughout the process, the project remains open to iteration.
This is what transforms MAA from a label into a method.
It’s also why the Commission asks for practice-oriented results — short, accessible practice abstracts, decision tools, and field-tested guidelines — not just academic papers. If an innovation cannot be explained to a farmer in a page or two, it is unlikely to work in the field.
Where Multi-Actor Projects Often Fail — and Why Evaluators Notice
Many proposals still treat MAA as a “checklist item.” Farmers are added late, consulted briefly, or assigned symbolic roles without real influence. Evaluators see this immediately.
The weaknesses tend to be similar: a farmers’ organisation listed as a partner with no budget for actual involvement; a single workshop disguised as “co-creation”; pilot farms chosen for convenience, not relevance; no plan for facilitation or conflict resolution; practice abstracts written only after results are already fixed.
These projects rarely achieve real uptake. Everyone feels it, even within the consortium — the sense that something is being “delivered to” farmers, rather than built with them.
When Multi-Actor Works, Everything Changes
By contrast, when the approach is taken seriously, the effect is unmistakable.
Projects become more grounded. Solutions are tested in soils and barns, not just in spreadsheets. Conflicts and constraints are surfaced early rather than discovered too late. Communication flows better because everyone sees themselves in the story. And when the project ends, the results don’t vanish into a forgotten deliverable folder — they move into practice, into advisory systems, into CAP networks, into the hands of people who trust them because they helped create them.
This is why the Commission keeps pushing the Multi-Actor Approach, and why more and more Cluster 6 topics make it mandatory. It isn’t about ticking a requirement. It’s about changing how innovation happens in one of Europe’s most complex and socially essential sectors.
A Simple Test for Every Agricultural Project
Whenever you read — or write — a proposal with an MAA requirement, try asking this:
If all the farmers and primary producers walked out of this project tomorrow, would anything truly essential collapse?
If the answer is no, then the project is not multi-actor — it’s performative.
If the answer is yes, then you are on the right track: you have built something interdependent, something rooted in real needs, something that carries a higher chance of surviving past the funding cycle.
Because when farmers become co-authors of innovation — not just line items in the budget — agricultural research stops being an academic exercise and becomes what it was always meant to be: a driver of meaningful, lasting change in the fields and communities that feed Europe.