Abstract
There have been many calls for an agroecological transition to respond to food shocks and crises stemming from conventional food systems. Participatory action research and transformative epistemologies, where communities are research actors rather than objects, have been proposed as a way to enhance this transition. However, despite numerous case studies, there is presently no overview of how participatory approaches contribute to agroecological transitions. The present article therefore aims to understand the effect of applying participatory action research (PAR) in agroecology. We undertook a systematic review of articles reporting methods and results from case studies in agroecological research. On the one hand, our systematic review of 347 articles shows that the agroecological research scope is broad, with all three types—as science, a set of practices and social movement—well-represented in the corpus. However, we can see a clear focus on agroecology “as a set of practices” as the primary type of use of the concept. On the other hand, we found a few case studies (23) with a participatory approach while most studies used extractive research methods. These studies show that understanding the drivers and obstacles for achieving an agroecological transition requires long-term research and trust between researchers and farmers. Such transformative epistemologies open doors to new questions on designing long-term PAR research in agroecology when confronted with a short-term project-based society.
Highlights
For some decades, agroecology has been presented as a reliable alternative to conventional agriculture, even though the definitions vary significantly (Stassart et al, 2012)
From all case studies selected (n = 347, see Table 3), 60% referred to agroecology as agro-ecological zoning, of which 202 articles were exclusively about AEZ (58%)
Despite a need for transformative methods, such as participatory action research, to support the scale-up to an agroecological transition, these methods are not often used in case studies published in peer-reviewed articles
Summary
Agroecology has been presented as a reliable alternative to conventional agriculture, even though the definitions vary significantly (Stassart et al, 2012). Research Approaches for Agroecological Transition approach to achieving sustainable food systems through ecological principles (Altieri, 1989; Francis et al, 2003; Gliessman, 2015). The scale at which agroecology was being studied broadened from plots and fields to food systems and regimes, the latter intertwined with food sovereignty movements (Wezel and Jauneau, 2011; McMichael, 2014). The debate has centered on the politics of the agroecological transition and food system transformation versus agricultural conformism (Rosset and Altieri, 2017; Giraldo and Rosset, 2018). Food is at the center of social-political stability, and agroecology might provide resilience toward food shocks and crises (De Schutter, 2010; De Schutter and Vanloqueren, 2011; Pimbert, 2017; Rosset and Altieri, 2017)
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