Abstract
In the face of climate change, rising hunger and mass extinctions, scholars stress the need to transition food systems from fossil fuel-dependent conventional farms to agroecological alternatives that can store carbon, improve food security and harbor biodiversity. Theory provides a systematic approach for organizing knowledge on agroecological transitions across the natural and social sciences and summarizing the primary needs of future research. This paper reviews the socio-ecological literature related to agroecological transitions from a mathematical perspective that is derived from complex systems and critical transition theory. We organize the literature according to mathematically tractable concepts, including syndromes of production, agents, barriers and drivers of change that operate across three major frameworks of analysis: socio-ecological, socio-technological and social norms and networks. Our approach embeds the current agroecological transition theory within a critical transition framework that considers the stability of peasant and capital syndromes in response to various inhibitors and drivers of change. We find that the majority of our theoretical knowledge of food system change is derived from the social sciences and limited primarily to examples from the Americas. Our work suggests a need for broader regional representations of change and transdisciplinary work aimed at better understanding how biophysical factors collide with socio-political conditions to hinder or reverse food systems change. Though scale and context are important considerations, we find that theory can generate general mechanisms that link separate case studies. For example, drivers of food system change that shift balances between the costs and benefits of peasant and capitalist modes of production may be particularly important for explaining poverty and gilded traps in agriculture. We discuss this and other lessons learned from taking a theoretical perspective on agroecological transitions.
Highlights
Conventional agricultural systems today contribute largely to climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity
Lack of biodiversity and intensive farming practices have eroded soils and decreased soil fertility over time (Giller et al, 1997; Altieri, 1999; Olson et al, 2017). This highly simplified global food system reduces the adaptive resilience of farms, making them vulnerable to climate variability and extreme weather events that are increasing in degree and frequency with climate change (Schlenker and Lobell, 2010)
Though many claim that low input agroecological techniques have productivity ceilings that are necessarily below high-input technological alternatives (Wilbois and Schmidt, 2019), some scholars retort that these limits are due primarily to social rather than technical factors, since for example, some subsistence farmers do not produce beyond what is required for subsistence, peasants often operate on marginal lands and agroecology receives less funding for technical innovations (Carter, 1984; Altieri et al, 2012; van der Ploeg, 2014; DeLonge et al, 2016)
Summary
Conventional agricultural systems today contribute largely to climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource scarcity. Theories of complex systems provide insight on how patterns emerge from individual behaviors and interactions (Levin, 1992, 1998) For example, the higher-scale pattern and dynamics of transitioning from high input agriculture toward agroecological farming can be understood and predicted through examining how interactions amongst critical agents influence farm management decisions.
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