About UNMEASURED

About UNMEASURED: a research project and collaborative network co-funded by the EU via the Agroecology Partnership and national funding partners.

The project runs for 36 months, from April 2026 to March 2029, with a total budget of EUR 2.3 million.

UNMEASURED is coordinated by Nina Isabella Moeller at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and brings together research institutions, farmers associations and civil society organisations in territorial networks (or “Living Labs”) across eight countries:

UNMEASURED is concerned with everything that is rendered invisible within the metric, quantitative and reductionist paradigm, yet remains important—perhaps essential—to the green transformation of agriculture and society.

We take a critical interest in qualitative aspects; social, cultural, spiritual and other value-bearing dimensions; “warm data”; and other forms of knowledge and experience that cannot easily be measured or weighed. We also attend to all that which, in practice, holds a system together and provides the grounding for collective agency in processes of change.

Syddansk Universitet (SDU), Denmark
Cordoba Universitet, Spain
Wageningen Universitet, The Netherlands
Thuenen Institut, Germany
RESEAU INTERNATIONAL URGENCI, France
ALPA – Land for Life, Romania
INRAE, France
CIHEAM IAMB, Italy
Frie Bønder – Levende Land, Denmark
Hungarian Agroecology Network Association, Hungary

If you would like to know more about UNMEASURED, or perhaps take part, offer input or constructive critique, please write to Nina.

~ see also the Danish language website ~

UNMEASURED will develop better ways of working with that which often falls outside standard measurement, simple quantification and reductionist indicators. The project starts from the premise that important aspects of agroecological transformation cannot always be reduced to numbers, indicators and simple comparisons. It will therefore strengthen existing assessment frameworks by integrating qualitative, participatory and context-sensitive methods, making social, cultural and ethical dimensions more visible and more usable in practice. For example:

UNMEASURED focuses on what is often difficult to measure, yet crucial to agroecological transformation. This includes social cohesion, relations of care, mutual aid, food sovereignty, knowledge sovereignty, cultural resilience, traditional knowledge, intergenerational justice, social justice and resilience in times of crisis.

Rather than rejecting quantitative measures, UNMEASURED works to ensure that they are complemented by methods better able to capture what otherwise disappears within standardised evaluation systems.

In this sense, UNMEASURED is concerned both with better knowledge and with fairer foundations for decision-making in agroecology.

In concrete terms, the project will identify gaps in existing agroecological assessment tools, co-create new qualitative indicators and participatory evaluation instruments, develop decision-support approaches that make trade-offs and value conflicts visible, and test all of this in Living Labs across different European contexts.

UNMEASURED thus builds a bridge between standardised measurement and local, experience-based knowledge.

The ambition of UNMEASURED is to make agroecological design and evaluation more holistic, more democratic, more epistemically just, and more useful for community building, practice, research and policy.

UNMEASURED works through a Living Lab approach in which farmers, civil society, researchers and other actors take part in the joint development and testing of new tools. Living Labs are understood as co-creative spaces for learning, reflection and territorial transformation. The project includes Living Labs and territorial agroecological networks in Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain.

This gives UNMEASURED a strong transnational foundation for developing methods that are both robust and sensitive to local differences…

A central aim of UNMEASURED is to make hidden trade-offs and value conflicts in agroecological transformation more visible. This includes, for example, tensions between economic, social, cultural and ecological concerns. The project will therefore also develop decision-support tools, dialogue formats and learning instruments, including game-based and participatory methods, that can be used by practitioners, advisors, researchers and decision-makers. In this way, UNMEASURED seeks to contribute to more context-sensitive and more just transformations of agriculture and food systems.

UNMEASURED is also conceived as a project with strong public and practical relevance. Its results will be shared here on this site and at Agroecology @ SDU, as well as through social media, workshops, webinars, training materials, policy briefs and a special issue of Rooted Magazine. The project places strong emphasis on open science and on ensuring that its tools and results are accessible and useful to different user groups.

UNMEASURED is therefore not only about research, but also about strengthening broader societal understanding of the values and possibilities of agroecology.

Here are some of the sources and inspirations that underpin UNMEASURED:

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This project is part of the programme of the AGROECOLOGY partnership, co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101132349.