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Agroecology, scaling and interdisciplinarity

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Abstract

Based on a review of its history, its present structure and its objective in the future, agroecology is defined as an integrative discipline that includes elements from agronomy, ecology, sociology and economics. Agroecology’s credentials as a separate scientific discipline were measured against the norms of science, defined by Robert King Merton (1973): communalism, universality, disinterestedness, originality and doubt. It is concluded that agroecology meets many of these norms and where it differs, it does so in a way that perhaps anticipates the manner and the direction in which the social position of science is changing.

Accepting agroecology as a separate scientific discipline, the two main issues with which it must contend were considered to be those of scaling and interdisciplinarity. Scaling is a problem because results of agroecological research are typically generated at small spatial scales whereas applications are frequently implemented in larger, administrative units. A framework to convey information from science to decision-makers was proposed and tested in a case study of farm energy use. Interdisciplinarity is a problem because researchers from different disciplines see the world from different viewpoints, use different language, work at different locations and use different criteria to evaluate one another’s work. Progress in this area is likely to be slow and driven by the need to justify the value of science to society.

Introduction

A major challenge facing the world is how a 21st century population of perhaps 9 billion people will feed themselves in a sustainable manner (Evans, 1998). During the 20th century, a doubled population was fed via the so-called Green Revolution, with its introduction of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and new high-yielding cultivars. With the reduction in the proportion of hungering people from more than 50% of the total population after World War II to under 20% today (Grigg, 1993), the success of this revolution is indisputable. However, there are still malnourished people and the impacts of intensive agriculture on natural resource degradation and the environment may not be sustainable (Brown et al., 2000). The proposed role of agroecology is to facilitate the design and management of sustainable food production systems (Gliessman, 1998), and to investigate possible synergisms that can help alleviate the above problems (Altieri, 1980). However, agroecology has not fully matured as a scientific discipline. In this paper, the definition and scientific method of agroecology, its credentials as a scientific discipline and the challenges that face it are considered. The intention is to establish a general framework for the integration of information within agroecology, and for the communication of this information to the decision-makers targeted. Here, it is recognised that the rationale for agroecology is currently the need to develop sustainable systems of food production and this requires that knowledge must be effectively delivered to the people who are in a position to take appropriate action.

Section snippets

A history of agroecology

The term agroecology was in parallel proposed by German zoologists (Friederichs, 1930), and American crop physiologists (Hanson, 1939) as a synonym for the application of ecology within agriculture. At that time, ecologists had relatively narrow foci but with a trend towards a more integrative view of ecosystems. The early population ecology school of Henry Gleason investigated plant populations seen from the organism’s perspective, thereby focusing on the hierarchical levels of the organism (

A separate discipline

To be considered a separate discipline, agroecology must be distinguishable from existing disciplines. The argument is that agroecology is distinguished from its parental disciplines of agronomy, ecology and socio-economics by its integration between these disciplines and across scales. The agroecology-related studies found in the literature survey were characterised by an integrative approach, where information from single disciplines was collected and combined to solve problems at a higher

Scale

The issue of scale means that there is a gap between the scale at which most agroecological information is currently generated and the scale at which most decisions concerning agricultural systems are made (Dalgaard, 2001). The results of agroecological studies, generated on the plot, field or farm level, cannot always readily be generalised to the regional, national or global level relevant for decision-makers. Because of this gap, the results are often misinterpreted or not used in the

Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary means working across traditional disciplinary boundaries. For science in general, this can lead to creative breakthroughs, the identification of oversights, and provide more holistic solutions than work within single disciplines (Nissani, 1997). For agroecology, the specific issue is its continued growth from its roots in agriculture and ecology to include relevant aspects in sociology and economics. This development is desirable both because humans are an integral and

Procedures and strategies to address agroecological questions at different scales

It is argued here that studies of how to cross the barriers of scaling and interdisciplinarity should be central issues for future agroecogical research projects. For soil sciences, Bouma (1997) drew similar conclusions and appealed for new methods to deal with the issues and proposed a seven-step procedure for research in sustainable management of agricultural soils (Bouma et al., 1998). This procedure was found useful to address agroecological questions (Wagenet, 1998) but problems were

Conclusions and perspectives

The current driving force for agroecology is the need to facilitate the development of more sustainable agricultural systems. This emphasis on sustainability is drawing agroecology up from its roots in agronomy and ecology to include elements of both sociology and economics. This study found that agroecology can currently be defined as the study of interactions between plants, animals, humans and the environment within agricultural systems. One of its hallmarks is that it integrates between

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the ARLAS research project, and the Danish Research Councils for funding this work as part of the research project Agrar2000, from which this is paper no. 4. Tommy Dalgaard would like to thank Dr. Avaz Koocheki from Iran and Professors Steve Gliessman and Miguel Altieri from the USA for initial discussions during a study visit to The Agroecology Centre, University of California, Santa Cruz and to Chris Kjeldsen, Aalborg University, for his comments on the thesis

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