Abstract
Introduction. Most of suggested and practically used framework for assessing the agrarian sustainability include three pillars – economic, social, and environmental. In recent years a new “fourth” governance pillar of sustainability has been introduced in academic literature and appeared in official documents of governmental, international, professional and business organizations. Nevertheless, the elaboration of the approach for assessing the governance sustainability of agriculture still is at the beginning stage. This article suggests a holistic framework for assessing the new governance pillar of agrarian sustainability. Materials and methods. A framework of new evolving interdisciplinary methodologies of Sustainable Development and the New Institutional Economics has been incorporated and a holistic system comprising of well-defined principles, criteria, indicators and reference values used for assessing governance sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture at national and (sub)sectoral (industry) levels. Results. Multi-principle, multi-criteria and multi-indicators assessment indicates that the Overall Governance Sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture is at a “Good” but very close to the “Satisfactory” level. Besides, there is a considerable differentiation in the level of Integral Governance sustainability of different agro-industries in the country. What is more, the individual indicators with the highest and lowest sustainability values determine the “critical” factors enhancing and deterring the particular and integral Governance sustainability of evaluated agro-system. Conclusion. Holistic assessments of governance and overall sustainability are important for improving the management of agrarian sustainability in general, and the Governance sustainability of agriculture in particular. Therefore, they are to be expended and their precision and representation increased. The later requires improvement of the precision through enlargement of surveyed farms and stakeholders, and incorporating more “objective” data from surveys, statistics, expertise of professionals in the area, etc.
Highlights
Most of suggested and practically used framework for assessing the agrarian sustainability include three pillars – economic, social, and environmental
Multi-principle, multi-criteria and multi-indicators assessment indicates that the Overall Governance Sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture is at a “Good” but very close to the “Satisfactory” level
A multiple indicators assessment of the Governance sustainability level of Bulgarian agriculture indicates that the Index of Overall Sustainability is 0,51 - this represents a close to the lower (“Satisfactory”) but still a “Good” level of Governance sustainability of the sector
Summary
The need to include “the fourth” governance pillar in the concept for understanding and the system of measurement of sustainability is increasingly justified in academic literature [1; 2; 10; 11; etc.] as well as finds place in the official documents of different (government, international, private, etc.) organizations [12; 13; 16]. The building of the system for assessing the “new” governance aspect (pillar) is still a “work in progress”. This paper tries to fill the gap and suggests a holistic framework for assessing the governance sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture. The newly elaborated approach is applied (tested) in a first in kind large-scale study for assessing the governance sustainability of country’s agriculture at national and sectoral levels
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