Agroecology as farmers’ situated ways of acting : a conceptual framework

ABSTRACT

The limits of numerous agricultural systems developed on principles set after the Second World War are increasingly identified and highlighted. Meanwhile, agricultural and food systems associated with agroecological principles are progressively institutionalized in various countries. Whereas a dominant research production by agronomists consists in deduction of “agroecological practices” from fundamental agroecological principles, a gap remains between those principles and the specific management actions on farms that allow to build new agroecological framing systems. In this study, we stem from an analysis of management actions in eight different case studies corresponding to farmers’ collectives engaged in an evolution of their practices towards agroecology. We review the agroecological scientific literature to identify shared principles and system properties deduced from them, that we iteratively compared to the practices implemented by farmers, making the transition in our case studies. Our proposal is then to describe agroecology “in the making” as 4 interconnected ways of acting, each corresponding to specific relations between management actions and the systems’ properties. Lastly, the analysis of agroecology from the actors’ management practices allows us to support a new viewpoint about a research agenda for agronomists, giving reflexive benchmarks to relocate research activities within the institutionalization dynamics of agroecology.

KEYWORDS:

• Agroecology
• management
• transition
• practices
• principles
• ways of acting

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by INRA under a funding from the SAD (Sciences pour l’Action et le Développement) department. We thank Liz Libbrecht-Carey for the translation and language editing of the English version of this paper.

Notes

^1. Here, the term “principle” is used in the sense of a general proposition from which the reasoning for the management of the agro-ecosystem is derived.

^2. A “property of the managed system” is a distinctive attribute of the system that we can relate to the ways of acting of nature or mankind. These properties are a set of phenomena and attributes which are specific to a particular system that can determine how it reacts under specific conditions.

^3. In this article, we use the term “agroecological farming system” to refer to theoretical developments that are intended to integrate technical and ecological aspects with the human dimension (e.g. “livestock farming systems”; Gibon, Rubino, and Sibbald et al. 1996). In line with Darnhofer, Gibbon, and Dedieu (2012), what we call an “agroecological farming system” “includes material objects (e.g. soils, plants, animals, buildings) as well as subjective perceptions, values and preferences, i.e. how farmers ‘make sense’ of their practices”, and situates the farm “in a territory, a locale, a region, with its specific agroecological setting, economic opportunities and cultural values”.

^4. Defined in this case as « a process in which farmers plan the introduction of new ways of farming on their farm, implement it, takes the necessary means to follow it up, and finally evaluate the results” (Catalogna and Navarrete 2016).

^5. http://www.paturajuste.fr/.

^6. http://www.osez-agroecologie.org/temoignages-d-agriculteurssur-leurs-pratiques-agroecologiques.

^7. www.agrifind.fr.

^8. Facebook Lookback – reliving their favourite memories on Fb -, video applications such as Animoto, WeVideo, presentation software such as Prezi; www.coe.int/t/dg4/autobiography/AEIVM_Tool_en.asp.

^9. http://www.agricool.net/forum/.

^10. https://www.latelierpaysan.org/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the INRA, dept. Sciences pour l’Action et le Développement.