Over the last century, the development of geographical indications has played an important role in the territorial dynamics of agricultural specialization in France, as well as for the conservation of local traditional and specialty agricultural products as part of cultural heritage which also helped to maintain diversified tastes and diets, as well as culinary know-hows in front of generalized agricultural modernization and standardization observed after World war II (Barham and Sylvander, 2011; Mazé 2023).

In the recent past, the concept of “terroir” served to crystallize the specific conjunction of human know-how and culture, techniques and their local natural environment, which is in fact subject to permanent reassessment and co-evolution, and the integration of all forms of technological, social or organizational innovations.

Due to trade disputes that have opposed the EU and the USA on intellectual property rights supporting GIs, an important research trend focused on the legal transfer of the EU PGI/PDO systems abroad. Their adoption by a growing number of countries worldwide is both regarded as a success, but also as a source of questioning due to the large diversity of transplantation patterns both from a legal, administrative and organizational perspective as well as with regards to their territorial impact, introducing divergences with the original French/European model.

In the recent literature, a lower attention was paid to the institutional transformations of PDO-PGI systems in France and the new organizational and regulatory challenges introduced by the EGALIM law on agroecological transitions, as well as to regulatory changes in EU supervision rules. The research project GingKo aims thus to fill this gap in the literature by addressing the new socio-economic and spatial challenges faced by GIs systems in France in the context of agroecological transitions, and by mirroring them to the dynamics observed in the other EU and non EU countries to promote more sustainability in GIs systems.