Supporting crop diversification within or outside the dominant agro-food regime: different barriers for different strategies

Adoption of crop diversification is a pillar of agroecological transition (Poux and Aubert, 2018) but faces many barriers, which emerged historically along the specialisation trend of modernisation. These barriers occur at different levels of the agri-food system, reinforce each other and create a situation of socio-technical lock-in (Meynard et al., 2018). They have been described mainly by studies focusing on conventional agriculture, rather oriented to commodity markets and involving temporal diversification (integration of a new crop in the rotation). However, diversification initiatives can involve a wider range of strategies and contexts. Our objective was to investigate whether the presence and conjunction of barriers could be specifically related to some diversification strategies. Developing such understanding would contribute to fine-tune research, innovation and political action in line with the type of crop diversification promoted.