eLTER PLUS is the Horizon 2020 project building Europe's Integrated Long-Term Ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI), through three pillars: networking, joint research, and transnational/remote/virtual access. It runs alongside the eLTER Preparation Phase Project (eLTER PPP) as part of the same larger effort to stand up the RI. Grant agreement No 871128, Horizon 2020. Project's website.

Although the project itself has ended, my involvement continues around the same three lines of work: building environmental policy support functions into future RI services, so the infrastructure can synthesise actionable knowledge rather than just data; developing an innovative instrument for long-term governance observation across European Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Platforms, the regions where transdisciplinary social-ecological research happens on the ground; and designing modelling approaches to understand how governance is structured and characterised in these regions, in ways that can travel to similar cases elsewhere.

Empowering Young Farmers to Coordinate Agrifood Transformations through Engaged Research Infrastructures and Agroecological Living Labs (EMPOWERALL, 2026-2029). EMPOWERALL tackles the systemic barriers—political, social, economic and environmental—that keep young farmers from leading agroecological transitions. Working through four Agroecological Living Labs (AELLs) in Romania, Slovakia, France and Spain, each embedded within an Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Platform, the project co-designs governance mechanisms, business models and agroecological innovations with young farmers, scientists, policymakers and local communities, and links these local experiments to eLTER's long-term observation network so the results are evidence-based and scalable. Co-funded by the Agroecology Partnership. The project's own visual identity and website are still under development; for now, EMPOWERALL is hosted as a page within the Agroecology Partnership site. 

I coordinate EMPOWERALL together with Cristina Chaminade. My work centres on the governance of the Agroecological Living Labs and their integration with LTSER Platforms: mapping stakeholders and co-designing Youth Advisory Councils in WP1, leading the analytical work behind a shared Participatory Systems Modelling framework in WP2, and steering the policy synthesis that connects AELL-level findings to EU-level recommendations on youth-led agroecological innovation in WP4.

Governance and business models for living labs: Rural regeneration hubs for tackling soil health challenges in the Mediterranean region (GOV4ALL, 2024-2028). Horizon Europe, Soil Mission project aimed at deploying a bottom-up participatory approach that will lead to the creation of five Soil Health Living Labs linked to Agro-innovation Hubs spread across France, Greece and Spain. The project connects farmers, scientists, NGOs, policymakers and the public towards a vision of an agricultural system that can generate income for rural communities while protecting natural resources, with a focus on regenerating the soil. Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101157865. Project's website.

Our work unfolds across two phases. In Phase 1 (2024-2026), we co-designed baseline governance models for the project's five Living Labs—in Lesvos (Aegean LL), the Altiplano Estepario (Alvelal LL), Menorca (Menorca LL), Val de Drôme (Solvi'Terra LL) and the Peloponnese (Thyrea LL)—through trust-building interviews, systemic scoping, governance roadmapping workshops and decision-making prototypes with each Living Lab's founding partners. Rather than importing a template, this process let each Living Lab's governance architecture emerge from its own institutional driver—science-led, farmer-led, NGO-led, public-authority-led, or entrepreneur-led—while remaining legible against a shared conceptual scaffolding of Social-Ecological Systems governance, network governance typologies, and the Governance Analytical Framework. Phase 2 (2026-2028) builds on this baseline to co-create a Formative Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Tool, extending the governance models into a place-based systems analysis, an operational learning instrument, and a bridge connecting each Living Lab's governance learning to policy influence pathways at local, national and EU levels.

ILTER2Unlock (2024-2027),  funded under the ILTER Research Initiatives Scheme, grows directly out of a research agenda on lock-ins and human evolutionary traps across Europe's Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research Platforms (currently under review in a peer-reviewed journal). That agenda argued that local lock-ins—self-reinforcing technological, institutional, or cognitive mechanisms—can accumulate across scales into systemic risk for the whole biosphere. This initiative tests that proposition empirically, focusing on the agri-food sector as a case where such cascading effects are especially visible. Working with experts and managers from diverse Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research (LTSER) Platforms, we will undertake field visits and participatory workshops to trace how standardised long-term observations could reveal cross-scale lock-in dynamics, later validated with a wider network of platforms. The project's outputs—a joint manuscript, a policy brief, and a proposed bridge between LTSER Platforms and Europe's emerging Rural Living Labs network—aim to turn diagnostic insight into an early-warning capacity for sustainability transformations.

For close to two decades, Doñana has been the ground on which I have learned to think about social-ecological systems. An estuary-delta on the lower Guadalquivir in southwest Spain, it is one of Europe’s most celebrated protected landscapes and, at the same time, one of its most chronically conflictual—a paradox that first drew me in and never quite let go. The case taught me that a coastal wetland’s ecosystems, agricultural landscapes, water resources, and the local communities and institutions that govern them form a single, tightly coupled system, and that they cannot be understood apart from the others. You can read my current synthesis of the case study here. To be continued...