International audienceWe performed a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the scientific literature on ecosystem services in order to help tracing a research agenda for agricultural sciences. The ecosystem services concept now lies at the heart of current developments to address global environmental change. Do agricultural sciences generate knowledge that covers this emerging theme? An analysis of scientific production allowed us to return to the ecological origins of this concept and see how little it has been appropriated by agricultural sciences until now, despite major focus on the issue of agro-ecosystems in the literature. Agricultural sciences tend to be more active in the field of environmental services, defined as services rendered by humans to ecosystems. The main studied services are those which have already been clearly identified and which act in synergy. Less attention is paid to the antagonisms between different services. These findings call for the implementation of agricultural research programmes that will consider the socio-agro-ecosystem as a whole and broaden the traditional issues addressed by agricultural sciences. We insist on three main management and operational issues that needs to be overcome if this is to be done: working at the landscape scale, increasing inter-disciplinary collaborations and take uncertainties into account

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The need for better conciliation between food production and environmental protection calls for new conceptual approaches in agronomy. Ecological intensification (EI) is one of the most encouraging and successful conceptual frameworks for designing more sustainable agricultural systems, though relying upon semantic ambivalences and epistemic tensions. This article discusses abilities and limits of the EI framework in the context of strong social and environmental pressure for agricultural transition. The purpose is thus to put EI at stake in the light of the results of an interdisciplinary and participatory research project that explicitly adopted EI goals in livestock semi-industrialized farming systems. Is it possible to maintain livestock production systems that are simultaneously productive, sustainable, and viable and have low nitrate emissions in vulnerable coastal areas? If so, how do local stakeholders use these approaches? The main steps of the innovation process are described. The effects of political and social dynamics on the continuity of the transition process are analyzed, with a reflexive approach. This experiment invites one to consider that making EI operational in a context of socio-technical transition toward agroecology represents system innovation, requiring on-going dialogue, reflexivity, and long-term involvement by researchers.

ABSTRACT. This article contributes to understanding the conditions of social-ecological change by focusing on the agency of individuals in the pathways to institutionalization. Drawing on the case of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), it addresses institutional entrepreneurship in an emerging environmental science-policy institution (ESPI) at a global scale.Drawing on ethnographic observations, semistructured interviews, and document analysis, we propose a detailed chronology of the genesis of the IPBES before focusing on the final phase of the negotiations toward the creation of the institution. We analyze the techniques and skills deployed by the chairman during the conference to handle the tensions at play both to prevent participants from deserting the negotiations arena and to prevent a lack of inclusiveness from discrediting the future institution. We stress that creating a new global environmental institution requires the situated exercise of an art of "having everybody on board" through techniques of inclusiveness that we characterize.Our results emphazise the major challenge of handling the fragmentation and plasticity of the groups of interest involved in the institutionalization process, thus adding to the theory of transformative agency of institutional entrepreneurs. Although inclusiveness might remain partly unattainable, such techniques of inclusiveness appear to be a major condition of the legitimacy and success of the institutionalization of a new global ESPI. Our results also add to the literature on boundary making within ESPIs by emphasizing the multiplicity and plasticity of the groups actually at stake.