“It is essential that together we create a positive narrative, promoting the richness and diversity of our regions.”

difficulties facing the four agricultural regions in the study (Le Morvan regional natural park, the Fermes du Figeac cooperative in the Lot department, the Rives du Haut-Allier intermunicipal association, and the Est Creuse Développement joint local government association in the Creuse department). The chief concern is the demographic decline caused to the collapse of the population in these areas, followed by the structural crisis in livestock farming and the isolation that inherently results from rural depopulation and reduced service offerings. These challenges feed a narrative that is often exclusively negative for these areas.

And so, to ensure farmers are able to earn a living, envision a bright future for these regions, and meet the challenges currently facing our societies, it is necessary to identify and showcase their unique potential so that a more positive narrative can be created: “We need to think about and showcase the diversity of our regions—you can drive twelve miles in the middle of the countryside and from one area to the next, there will be differences on display.It’s an immensely rich tapestry!” said Laurent Lelli, a geographer and researcher who serves as the Director of the Clermont-Ferrand Campus.

What if these challenges could instead be transformed into local specificities and drivers for change?  With this idea in mind from the very outset of the project, farmers, locals, businesses, artists, and local governments, working in association with the researchers coordinating the program, began to hunt for specificities that would enable them to create a sustainable strategy able to correspond to the particular issues facing their own local area.

“To make things happen, you need to recreate a social connection in these areas, a connection between the farmers and the various local stakeholders present.And farmers, too, need to accept a new way of looking at things,” said Laurent Lelli.
 (Re)establishing this connection and developing a more positive shared narrative meant getting the entire action research action team on board for a three-year field study with a strategy centered on an analytical framework for research and a host of events, seminars, study trips, etc. This “methodological back-and-forth” was necessary to define the local specificities to be leveraged. To this end, the shared narrative served several purposes in the region, chief among them being an economic necessity—ensuring that the maximum added value would be brought back into the region—but also purposes related to landscape, heritage, history, and culture, enabling local stakeholders and inhabitants to redevelop a strong feeling of attachment to “their agriculture.”

Two examples mentioned in the video—hazelnuts in Creuse and chestnuts in Lot—demonstrate the importance of including a wide and representative range of people in the panel (such as people working in the food industry, for hazelnuts!), of allocating a long period of time for analysis, and of working to understand the specific problems encountered by people the local area to envision a brighter future. After all, a local specificity alone cannot lead to action—you need a community-oriented approach to truly make things happen. “The results from the past three years have been very positive, with good involvement from local governments, motivated teams, and a methodology that has been tried and tested by the parties involved in the program.In some areas, this program has allowed locals to take things a step further, with the relaunch of chestnut production in Figeac, for example, or the development of a diversification project for hazelnuts in Creuse, as well as the support given to a livestock cooperative producing Tomme cheese in Le Morvan.Now that this project has proven a success, we would like to see it expanded to new areas of France,” said Laurent Lelli.

The first edition of the REACTEURS program, which came to an end in 2022, was funded by ANCT Massif and the public interest consortium GIP Massif Central, with additional funding from the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the French National Fund for Regional Planning and Development (FNADT).