Pressures on Local Production and Collective Responses
On 8 July 2026, the İzmir Living Lab held its seventh co-creation session as part of the ASSETS Project, bringing together local producers to explore the structural challenges facing ecological and local agricultural production in the region.
Exploring Pressures on Local Production
The session was designed as a participatory discussion rooted in the lived experiences and observations of producers themselves, aiming to better understand the key pressures influencing local production systems and rural livelihoods — and the structural drivers behind them.
A Two-Part Collaborative Exercise
The session was structured around two collaborative canvas exercises:
- Mapping the challenges – Participants identified and mapped the main pressures affecting agricultural production, including issues related to water resources, soil quality, biodiversity, production costs, market conditions, institutional coordination, and rural living conditions. The group collectively explored both the impacts of these pressures and their root causes, mapping the relationships between different issues.
- Identifying solutions and future actions – The second canvas shifted focus to possible responses. Participants discussed support mechanisms, opportunities for collaboration, and the roles that local authorities, NGOs, universities, and producer networks could play in strengthening ecological production and rural resilience. The session also explored how advocacy efforts could be reinforced, and identified priority issues to be taken up in the next co-creation session with legal and governance experts.
Building Collective Responses for Rural Resilience
The discussions underlined how closely agricultural sustainability, institutional coordination, and rural livelihoods are interconnected. By bringing producers together in a structured yet participatory format, the session helped surface both shared challenges and collective aspirations — a key step in developing meaningful, grounded responses within the ASSETS framework.
Many thanks to the İzmir Living Lab team for organising this session and for their continued commitment to participatory co-creation within the project.
