The cluster shares a conviction: scientific rigor goes hand in hand with ethical and societal responsibility, in the spirit of post-normal science. Members recognize the complexity of the systems they study and believe that research must contribute to building more sustainable, fair, and resilient societies.

Our work invites us to rethink models of society based on two common denominators: a strong grounding in the field and a systemic reading of the relationships between humans and the environment. In a context of systemic crises, we make the territory, understood as "an elaborated, socially constructed, culturally marked, and institutionally regulated space" (Lopez & Muchnik, 1997), the central concept of our analyses, both as a place of observation and analysis, but also sometimes of action and co-construction of transformations.

The members of the cluster share:

1. Recognition of the challenges of sustainability and systemic crises, considered in their relational dimension, and the need to respond to them collectively by orienting research towards a normative and desirable horizon.
2. A field-based approach, attentive to locally rooted realities, mobilizing qualitative and quantitative approaches depending on the context, in Europe and elsewhere.
3. A reflexive and committed stance, where researchers recognize their place in the dynamics they study, with degrees of involvement ranging from observation to participation, collaboration, or action research.

Behind this common identity lies a diversity of thematic areas:

• Rural territories and territorial transformations: territorial transformations involve a redefinition of "rural development" that highlights the specificities and essential functions of rural life: providing a quality environment, promoting sustainable agriculture and food, more participatory forms of governance, etc. The territorialization of food systems is a central theme, at the intersection of the relationships between biodiversity, agriculture, and nature.
• Migration dynamics and environmental vulnerabilities: the study of interactions between environmental change, human mobility, risks, and community resilience contributes to the design of more equitable adaptation policies.
• Health geography, human-nature relations, and the One Health approach: analyzing the links between health, the environment, and socio-economic factors contributes to understanding territorial inequalities. Adopting a One Health perspective, the study of perceptions of epidemic risk and human-nature relations is part of an approach focused on local co-creation and reflexivity.
• Environmental humanities: the exploration of representations, discourses, and subjectivities through which actors express their relationship to the environment, using big data and quantitative and textual methods, is used to access the subjectivities of actors as lived experiences. 

These areas of research, which are complementary in their approaches and fields, reflect a shared ambition: to produce knowledge that is rooted in and serves territorial and socio-environmental transformations.

• 2022-2028: Thesis - Spatio-temporal evolution of dengue outbreaks, epidemic factors, risk perception, and human-nature relationship in Argentina. | J. Piette, C. Linard, and V. Andreo
• 2024-2027: Towards a watershed community in Bujumbura: participatory and interdisciplinary action research on resilient strategies in the face of so-called natural disasters | S. Dujardin & C. Linard
• 2024-2025: Analysis of land rights configurations on farms supported by Terre-en-Vue | Aliz Hevesi - Partnership with Terre-en-Vue
• 2025-2029: Thesis - Reconciling food system sustainability and biodiversity conservation: the case of the Coeur de Condroz Nature Park | Aliz Hevesi - emBrace projecthttps://embracebiodiversa.wordpress.com/
• 2025-2028: Embrace Project - Reconciling Food Systems Sustainability and Biodiversity Conservation in Multifunctional Protected Areas | Nicolas Dendoncker, Aliz Hevesi
• 2019-2028: Thesis - Towards a critical sociology of the territorialization of the food system | Dalimier J., Dendoncker N. & Maréchal K.