Abstract
Agroecology has come a long way. In the past ten years, it has reappeared in France throughout the agricultural sector and is now included in public and private strategies and in supportive policies, with collateral interest effects. Is a new “agro-revolution” taking place? To address this issue, using a methodology mixing hyperlink mapping and textual corpora analysis, we focus here on the trajectory of agroecology in various worlds: that of academia, social movements, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that promote international solidarity, research and training institutions and public policies. This trajectory intertwines actors and time lines, with periods in which certain actors play a specific role, and others in which interactions between actors are dominant in terms of coalition advocacy. Some actors play a major role in circulating agroecology as they belong to several different social worlds (e.g., academia and NGO), present high occupational mobility (from politician to scientist and vice versa), are charismatic or have an irradiating aura in the media, and can articulate and circulate ideas between different social arenas (including between countries). The stabilization of networks of actors is interpreted as the institutionalization of agroecology, both within social movements as well as because of its integration into a policy aimed at an ecological modernization of agriculture. The international positioning of many actors anchors national and regional initiatives more strongly. It is also a prerequisite for the amplification and development of agroecology.
Highlights
France plays a special role in the dynamic landscape of agroecology in Europe
The policy dimension of agroecology was relatively absent in the past, except in the case of Brazil [4], whereas it only appeared in France in 2012 with the arrival of Stéphane Le Foll in the French government
We focus on the French situation and update our previous work [5], with the intent of addressing how the institutionalization of agroecology can enable a transition in agricultural and food systems
Summary
In spite of pioneer works that explicitly used the term agroecology in French literature in the past [1,2], more than 25 years elapsed before the term significantly appeared in a variety of arenas: social movements, NGOs promoting international solidarity, public policies, research institutions, agricultural schools, the private sector, etc. We focus on the French situation and update our previous work [5], with the intent of addressing how the institutionalization of agroecology can enable a transition in agricultural and food systems. Our previous analysis of the institutionalization of the concept of agroecology [5] showed that before agroecology appeared on the French policy agenda, the French Web space of actors referring to agroecology was structurally and semantically polarized. Rabhi and the association “Nature et Progrès”, created in 1964)
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