Codevelopment groups as a hybrid tool for supporting and studying extension work: lessons from an action-research with French dairy PDO animators

Purpose This article examines professional codevelopment group (CDG) workshops as both peer support for agrifood extension professionals and a source of empirical data on their everyday work, in the context of climate adaptation in French dairy Geographical Indication (GI) value chains.Design/Methodology/Approach Five CDG workshops (September 2024–May 2025) were conducted within the ADAOPT action-research project with animators from six French dairy PGI/PDO organisations. Data combine thematic and logometric analyses of four transcribed workshops and one observational report.Findings Seven themes and four lexical classes reveal a saturated facilitation role, tensions between core-group dynamics and representativeness, governance and monitoring as invisible yet decisive activities, and difficulties in scaling learning beyond pioneer groups. A key tension emerges: climate adaptation is simultaneously deprioritised in formal agendas yet implicitly structures operational priorities. The logometric classification further reveals a structural opposition between institutional maintenance work and transition-oriented collective action, suggesting that this tension shapes the architecture of animators’ professional preoccupations.Practical implications CDG workshops strengthen reflexive, relational and strategic competences among extension professionals and make governance trade-offs discussable, offering a format transferable to in-service training.Theoretical implications CDG functions as a hybrid tool, simultaneously an intervention and a research method, able to access the often-invisible work of intermediary actors in agricultural knowledge and innovation systems.Originality/value This is one of the first empirical applications of CDG in agricultural extension research, combining thematic and logometric analysis to study extensionists’ everyday practices in GI dairy value chains facing climate adaptation.