Timeline: January 2023-December 2026
Funding institution: State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) within the framework of Horizon Europe

SWIFT, which stands for Supporting Women-Led Innovations in Farming and Rural Territories, is a 4 year long Horizon Europe project which aims to advance the position of women and LGBTQI+ persons in farming, and to investigate the ways in which feminist agroecological processes can promote gender equality and food sovereignty. SWIFT has 14 partners from nine countries and engages with 21 Women-Led Initiatives across 12 countries across Europe, as well as 5 initiatives in Brazil and the USA. The project was co-developed with social movement actors – in particular the Women’s Articulation of the European Coordination of Via Campesina – as a way to render visible the frequently overlooked contributions of women and gender diverse persons to social and ecological transformations in rural territories and to work towards agrarian policies that better support their objectives.

CONTENTS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE RESEARCH

In line with the approach that seeks to promote feminist and agroecological transformations in Europe’s rural territories, the project has the following objectives:

• Design and test an innovative SWIFT methodology and conceptual framework grounded in feminist approaches and human rights-based perspectives;
• Co-develop intersectional methodologies and tools to analyse women-led innovations in agriculture and food systems;
• Strengthen co-learning across initiatives within and between different country contexts in Europe and beyond to amplify women-led innovations and empower diverse groups to act for change;
• Provide and test practical tools to reframe agricultural and rural policies based on the SWIFT conceptual framework;
• Scale novel feminist and human rights-based perspectives on productive and reproductive contributions to sustainable rural development into agricultural policies.

The research in Switzerland – being led by the Geneva Graduate Institute – will focus on the contributions of individuals and associations to policy debates on equal rights to own and access land and natural resources, social security entitlements and the representation of women and gender diverse persons within farmers’ organisations and agricultural policy-making fora.

SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT

SWIFT is an interdisciplinary project that engages with applied feminist innovation studies and seeks to bring together work on the human rights of peasants, feminist political ecology, feminist institutionalism and rural sociology. The application of a feminist participatory research methodology throughout the construction, development and implementation of the project seeks to dissolve the barriers between research and practice by prioritising forms of participatory action research. To do this, SWIFT partners will use a range of methodologies including; photo voice, podcasts, life histories and participatory video alongside public policy and discourse analysis, human rights-based approaches, gender-responsive budgeting and feminist farm viability indicators.