Conclusions - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 205

Chapter 14
Conclusions
L-A. Sutherland 1 , L. Zagata 2 and G.A. Wilson 3
1 James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen ([e-mail]); 2 Czech University
of Life Sciences, Prague; 3 Plymouth University
Introduction
The primary purpose of this topic has been to assess the mechanisms involved in enabling
sustainability transitions in European agriculture. The research focused on emerging
transitions : 'transitions in the making', with the potential to have major impacts on
mainstream farming practices. This emphasis was intentionally normative, specifically
oriented towards assessing transition processes which aim to increase the sustainability of
agriculture in Europe, by optimizing the resources and opportunity sets evident at regional
level. The need for increased sustainability has been described in the introduction to this
book (Sutherland et al .a, this volume). Challenges include the growing and varied
demands on agricultural systems by society, including food security, safety and quality;
climate change and competition for natural resources; economic recession and the subsidy
dependence of EU agricultural production systems; rural outmigration and land
abandonment in remote areas; intensification and counter-urbanization in peri-urban
areas; and a perceived shortage of young people working in agriculture. In this chapter we
highlight the cross-cutting themes from the research, emphasizing in particular the
implications for sustainability transitions and the role of young people in innovation
processes. We conclude by identifying future research needs, specifically in relation to the
utility of the multi-level perspective (MLP), for the study of agricultural transitions.
One of the key contributions of this research has been the operationalization of the
MLP for use in empirical field research. Previously, the MLP had primarily been used to
assess historic, completed transitions (see Karanikolas et al. , this volume) Analysis, thus,
appears to have relied on document review but methods are rarely discussed 1 . In order to
assess emerging transitions, empirical field research was required. The particular
challenges of operationalizing the MLP, and the methods adopted, have been discussed by
Karanikolas et al. and Pinto-Correia et al. b (both this volume), with theoretical
implications addressed by Darnhofer et al. (this volume). These chapters demonstrate that
1 Geels and Schot (2010) describe their methods broadly as a form of 'process theory', where narrative is
generated through theoretically informed analysis of events. However, the formal description of data sources,
analytical techniques and methodological limitations characteristic of most empirical field research studies, are
noticeably absent from the MLP literature.