Measuring agroecology and its performance: An overview and critical discussion of existing tools and approaches

Abstract

Agricultural and food systems (AFSs) are inherently multifunctional, representing a major driver for global crises but at the same time representing a huge potential for addressing multiple challenges simultaneously and contributing systemically to the achievement of sustainable development goals. Current performance metrics for AFS often fail to take this multifunctionality into account, focusing disproportionately on productivity and profitability, thereby excluding “externalities,” that is, key environmental and social values created by AFS. Agroecology is increasingly being recognized as a promising approach for AFS sustainability, due to its holistic and transformative nature. This growing interest in and commitment to agroecology by diverse actors implies a need for harmonized approaches to determine when a practice, project, investment, or policy can be considered agroecological, as well as approaches that ensure the multiple economic, environmental, and social values created by AFS are appropriately captured, hence creating a level playing field for comparing agroecology to alternatives. In this contribution to the special issue on agroecology, we present an overview of existing tools and frameworks for defining and measuring agroecology and its performance and critically discuss their limitations. We identify several deficiencies, including a shortage of approaches that allow for measuring agroecology and its performance on landscape and food system scale, and the use of standardized indicators for measuring agroecology integration, despite its context-specificity. These insights highlight the need for assessments focused on these overlooked scales and research on how best to reconcile the need for globally comparable approaches with assessing agroecology in a locally relevant manner. Lastly, we outline ongoing initiatives on behalf of the Agroecology Transformative Partnership that aim to overcome these shortcomings and offer a promising avenue for working toward harmonization of approaches. All readers are invited to contribute to these collaborative efforts in line with the agroecology principle of participation and co-creation of knowledge.

Assessing the agroecological performance and sustainability of Community Supported Agriculture farms in Flanders, Belgium

“…Moreover, in questions in which the perceptions of farmers were underlying the outcome, an "upward" or "downward" social desirability bias could have influenced the results based on the conversation with the farmers during the interviews: an 'upward' bias stemming from the self-identification with agroecology, which could lead to farmers wanting to have high scores on their characterization; and a 'downward' bias stemming from an idealistic sense in agroecologically-inspired farmers in which they felt further progress in the agroecological transition still had to be possible and necessary. Furthermore, an assessment of the sustainability performance centered on agroecology and its specific interpretation of sustainability might lead to a self-fulfilling and so-called agroecology bias, highlighting the additional need for other, more neutral tools in order to comprehensively compare agroecology with alternatives (Geck et al, 2023). Moreover, several indices and criteria proposed in the TAPE methodology were of little relevance to the specific regional context or the context of CSA farms, and where possible these indices were contextualized to make relevant interpretations possible.…”

“…These proposals raise the issue of balancing the need for assessing agroecology in a manner that is both globally comparable on the one hand side while being locally relevant on the other, as highlighted by Geck et al (2023). To balance the existing tradeoffs between the evaluation purpose, the time requirement and the level of participation in the existing methods, Darmaun et al (2023) propose to use a combination of approaches to improve the assessment of agroecology.…”

“…Assessments of agroecological transitions are however complicated by their diverse starting points and modalities, together with the broadening scope, scale and dimensions of agroecology (Wezel et al, 2020). Many of the above-mentioned definitions and frameworks have served as the basis for the development of assessment methods, of which Geck et al (2023) provide an overview and critical discussion. One of the most prominent assessment methods for agroecology is the Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE), developed by the FAO in order to evaluate agroecology, to measure progress in agroecological transitions and to build harmonized evidence of its contribution to sustainability (Mottet et al, 2020).…”

“…The tool was created through a participatory and multistakeholder process and is based on the 10 Elements of Agroecology. It is a quantitative tool which simultaneously characterizes agroecology and assesses its performance, and it can be applied in any geographical location and ranging from the field to the farm, landscape and national scale although the focus lies on the field and farm scale (Darmaun et al, 2023;Geck et al, 2023). The TAPE received widespread interest and different actors, organizations and governments are adopting and adapting it, while it is currently in use in more than 30 countries in different geographic regions, territories and production systems, with most publications on its use coming from the Global South at the time of writing (Lucantoni et al, 2023).…”

Bibliometric Analysis of the State of Research on Agroecology Adoption and Methods Used for Its Assessment

“…For instance, keyword analysis revealed that machine learning methods and econometric ones are not widely used to model the process of farm agroecological adoption. Most methodological studies have focused on developing a framework for evaluating the process of adopting agroecology using indicators or a multi-criteria approach [2,8,66,67].…”