THIRD WORLD NETWORK INFORMATION SERVICE ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
Dear Friends and Colleagues
Transforming Agriculture and Food Systems Using the 10 Elements of Agroecology
The FAO has approved the 10 Elements of Agroecology as an analytical framework to support the design of differentiated paths for agriculture and food systems transformation. The 10 elements are: diversity, co-creation and sharing of knowledge, synergies, efficiency, recycling, resilience, human and social values, culture and food traditions, responsible governance, circular and solidarity economy. This framework builds on existing analyses that have advanced agroecology as a science, a practice and a social movement as well as efforts to address global sustainability challenges.
The transition towards sustainable agriculture and food systems remains often intractable because of the failure to deal with the issue in a sufficiently holistic way and to recognize the critical importance of pervasive interactions of a wide range of biological, socio-economic, cultural and political variables over time. The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework seeks to overcome this. Four entry points have been identified in a recent paper: biodiversity (Element: Diversity), consumers (Element: Circular and solidarity economy), education (Element: Cocreation and sharing of knowledge) and governance (Element: Responsible governance). For each entry point, a promising nexus is identified that highlights salient interactions with multiple sectors, and where icons depicting each Element build a visual narrative to dissect and describe a plausible theory of transformative change towards sustainable agriculture and food systems, later validated with tangible examples.
The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework recognizes that transformative change could be taking place simultaneously through many routes, at multiple locations, starting from different baseline conditions, and progressing at different rates. The diversity of trajectory options further highlights its flexibility and major opportunities for adapting actions to local realities. This suggests that the pace of transformative change of agriculture towards desired sustainability outcomes could possibly be faster than anticipated and hence hold greater prospects to achieving the SDGs by 2030. Furthermore, this type of structure can allow different stakeholders to articulate challenges faced, build consensus towards desired goals, use a common language when sharing information on the status of implementation, and encourage collective action and alignment towards achieving the greatest possible impact.
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THE 10 ELEMENTS OF AGROECOLOGY: ENABLING TRANSITIONS TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SYSTEMS THROUGH VISUAL NARRATIVES
Edmundo Barrios et al.
Ecosystems and People, 16:1, 230-247
September 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/26395916.2020.1808705
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344172797_The_10_Elements_of_Agroecology_enabling_transitions_towards_sustainable_agriculture_and_food_systems_through_visual_narratives
[EXCERPTS ONLY]
Abstract
The magnitude and urgency of the challenges facing agriculture and food systems demand profound modifications in different aspects of human activity to achieve real transformative change and sustainability. Recognizing that the inherent complexity of achieving sustainability is commonly seen as a deterrent to decision-making, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has approved the 10 Elements of Agroecology as an analytical framework to support the design of differentiated paths for agriculture and food systems transformation, hence facilitating improved decision-making by policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders in differing contexts at a range of levels on a number of scales. Biodiversity, consumers, education and governance are identified as promising entry points to build a structured process using visual narratives that rely on the 10 Elements of Agroecology to graphically dissect prospective social-ecological transition trajectories. We illustrate such applications with examples from agroforestry worldwide, public food procurement in Brazil and the United States of America, and agroecology education vis-à-vis secure access to land in Senegal. Nexus approaches are used to highlight and examine salient interactions among different sectors and entry points, and to develop visual narratives describing plausible theories of transformative change towards sustainable agriculture and food systems.
Introduction
The world’s agriculture and food systems are not presently delivering desirable outcomes on food security and nutrition (FAO 2019a). In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted, with SDG2 committing to ‘end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture’ by 2030 (UN 2015). The SDGs recognized, well beyond previous global goals, the strong interconnectivity among development goals. Thus, issues of hunger and malnutrition are linked to issues of equity, justice and employment, along with environmental sustainability – hence the need for holistic approaches. In order to meet SDG2, there is an urgent need for transformative change, understood here as a profound transformation of human activity across multiple dimensions and at multiple scales (Caron et al. 2018; Vermeulen et al. 2018; Díaz et al. 2019). The consensus call for transformative change has been further emphasized in several recent Global Assessment Reports (UNCCD 2017; IPBES 2018, 2019; IPCC 2019) and triggered the ongoing IPBES Transformative Change Assessment (IPBES 2020). Despite the growing consensus on the need for transformative change, however, there has been less agreement on how this could be accomplished (Foran et al. 2014; Veldhuizen et al. 2020). A recent large-scale quantitative textual analysis of the scientific literature on ‘how to feed the world’ highlights a disproportionate emphasis on increasing food production via technology, and the need for holistic approaches that consider three fundamental levers, namely, population, diet and food production in an integrated way (Tamburino et al. 2020). This is consistent with earlier studies recommending greater attention to multidimensional performance rather than to the prevalent focus on the productivity metric (Tittonell 2014; Gliessman 2016; Caron et al. 2018; Pretty 2018; Rasmussen et al. 2018; Tomich et al. 2018). Successful transitions towards sustainable agriculture and food systems would likely benefit from holistic and people-centred approaches that embrace a long-term vision, such as agroecology, which is increasingly acknowledged for its potential to bring about transformative changes required to meet the SDGs (FAO 2018a; HLPE 2019).
Agroecology has moved from being an ecology based discipline, defined by five principles (i.e. efficiency, diversity, synergies, natural regulation and recycling), to being a broader, multidimensional concept that required additional principles to be defined, such as those in the realm of social, political and economic disciplines and dimensions (Altieri 1995; Wezel et al. 2014; Gliessman 2015; Dumont et al. 2016; Anderson et al. 2019a). Three major steps – increasing eco-efficiency, input substitution, system re-design – have been identified in the transition towards more sustainable agriculture and food systems (Tittonell 2014; Pretty 2018), based on the early descriptions of agroecological transitions put forward by Gliessman (1998) and others in the last century. While much has been written about increasing the efficiency of agricultural systems and the role of substitution processes in supporting such efficiency gains (Keating et al. 2009; Tittonell and Giller 2013; van Ittersum et al. 2013), significantly less explicit attention has been devoted to the re-design of agroecosystems resulting from the interaction of multiple forces through time.
Re-design processes as a means to achieve agricultural sustainability are inherently complex because they need to optimize the economic, social and ecological dimensions simultaneously, including poverty eradication and climate change adaptation and mitigation (Caron et al. 2018; Teixeira et al. 2018; Springmann et al. 2018). The transition towards sustainable agriculture and food systems remains often intractable because of the failure to deal with the issue in a sufficiently holistic way and to recognize the critical importance of pervasive interactions of a wide range of biological, socio-economic, cultural and political variables over time (Foran et al. 2014; IPES-Food 2016; Gosnell et al. 2019; Tamburino et al. 2020). It is not just a problem of poor choice of germplasm and cropping system design, but also of limitations in soil nutrient availability, often related to incidence of pests and diseases; of the linkage between land degradation and poverty; of unconducive national and global policies with respect to incentives; and of institutional failures (Tittonell et al. 2016). However, the re-design of agricultural systems to transition towards sustainability should require a comprehensive, yet broadly applicable monitoring and evaluation framework. Continuous evaluation is central to re-design (Groot et al. 2016; Kanter et al. 2018; Tittonell 2019), and in the case of social-ecological transitions guided by the 10 Elements of Agroecology, hereafter referred to as ‘agroecological transitions’ for brevity, monitoring and evaluation should require integrative frameworks that consider the ecological as well as the socioeconomic, cultural and political dimensions of agroecology.
FAO’s Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture (FAO 2014) consists of five general principles: (i) improving efficiency in the use of resources; (ii) conserving, protecting and enhancing natural ecosystems; (iii) protecting and improving rural livelihoods, equity and social well-being; (iv) enhancing resilience of people, communities and ecosystems; and (v) promoting good governance of both natural and human systems. To enhance the sustainability of food and agriculture, FAO has developed different frameworks, approaches, policies, tools and techniques to operationalize this Common Vision (e.g. climate-smart agriculture; ecosystem approach to fisheries/aquaculture; Save and Grow; Sustainable Land Management). As calls have increased for a more holistic approach across sectors, embracing social equity along with environmental safeguards, FAO proposes the 10 Elements of Agroecology as a framework to structure, describe and explore the realm of agroecology as another possible pathway to operationalize the Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture, recognizing both diversity of approaches while maintaining a holistic focus. This framework builds on existing analyses that have advanced agroecology as a science, a practice and a social movement (Altieri 1995; Tomich et al. 2011; Tittonell 2014; Wezel et al. 2014; Gliessman 2015) as well as efforts to address global sustainability challenges (Steffen et al. 2015; Springmann et al. 2018). The objective of this paper is to present the 10 Elements of Agroecology framework (c.f. FAO 2018b) as a tool to facilitate the design of differentiated paths for the transformation of agriculture and food systems. Building on the four common recommendations derived from the regional seminars on agroecological transitions (FAO 2018c), and on Caron et al.’s (2018) four part transformation of food systems, we identify four promising entry points – biodiversity, consumers, education and governance – to build an argument for future practice and provide a structured process that succinctly links the 10 Elements of Agroecology to the design of prospective agroecological transitions. Nexus approaches (Liu et al. 2018) are also proposed here to highlight and examine salient interactions among different sectors and entry points, and develop visual narratives using the 10 Elements of Agroecology icons to describe plausible theories of transformative change towards sustainable agriculture and food systems.
Concluding Remarks
The magnitude and complexity of sustainability challenges faced by agriculture, and humanity alike, highlight the profound modifications in different aspects of human activity needed to achieve transformative change.
The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework recognizes that transformative change could be taking place simultaneously through many routes, at multiple locations, starting from different baseline conditions, and progressing at different rates. The diversity of trajectory options further highlights its flexibility and major opportunities for adapting actions to local realities. This suggests that the pace of transformative change of agriculture towards desired sustainability outcomes could possibly be faster than anticipated and hence hold greater prospects to achieving the SDGs by 2030.
The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework is not without criticism, particularly because of the heterogeneity of the different elements, including systems of numerous components in which major interactions can be nonlinear, interdependent and involve feedback loops, as well as the difficulty of identifying valid thresholds to assess more sustainable development trajectories. Despite these limitations, we consider the 10 Elements of Agroecology to be useful for framing the recognized complexity of food and agricultural systems, into a simplified, yet holistic version of reality that can facilitate decision-making by policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders at different scales along agroecological transitions towards sustainable agriculture and food systems (Biovision 2019; HLPE 2019; INKOTA 2019; Anderson et al. 2019a).
Furthermore, this type of structure can allow different stakeholders to articulate challenges faced, build consensus towards desired goals, use a common language when sharing information on the status of implementation, and encourage collective action and alignment towards achieving the greatest possible impact. Nevertheless, key knowledge gaps remain:
- There is a need to develop or adapt methodological tools to facilitate integrative thinking and co-creation processes that recognize the value of linking ecological sciences with social sciences, incorporate knowledge that may originate outside of conventional paradigms of science, and embrace culture and food traditions through participatory and action-oriented approaches to research.
- There is need for better understanding of what works in what contexts in agricultural and food systems – in terms of spatial and temporal scale dynamics, including feedback mechanisms – in order to support system re-design efforts aiming at maximizing synergies and complementarities and minimizing trade-offs.
- Despite their crucial role in strengthening resilience in agroecology, we know little about how system components react to more than one environmental or social factor at a time. A better understanding of the impact of increasing the number of interacting and simultaneous global change factors on system change would also be important.
- Developing or adapting existing multidimensional assessment tools (e.g. Grabowski et al. 2018; FAO 2019g; van Wijk et al. 2020) is also central to building such understanding of change and predicting the magnitude of such change across scales, time and place.
Given the crosscutting nature of knowledge gaps identified, improvements achieved addressing any of them could significantly contribute to the different nexus examples highlighted in this paper hence the potential remains for the 10 Elements of Agroecology framework to further facilitate linking knowledge to action.
The 10 elements as a framework helps to think about systems in a broad sense beyond focusing on specific problems, encourages thinking beyond the farm level (i.e. landscapes and community levels), and shows that manageable levels of complexity – consistent with a holistic approach – need not be a burden to promote transformation.