Introduction - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 8

and capabilities of agriculture, but also includes the tenet that interactions between
individual farm models and farming systems at regional level are a key aspect of
sustainability. Different approaches to farming can be expected to provide different public
goods, functions and ecosystem services (e.g. food security, employment, public access,
energy crops), and they are expected to interact in complementary as well as conflicting
ways (e.g. local food competing with organic food on supermarket shelves). However, what
is crucial is whether farming models present within a region interact in such a way as to
meet the changing needs and demands of consumers, members of the production system,
and citizens (both within the region and more broadly across Europe), while also providing
socially and economically viable livelihoods for farm households. Sustainability of
agricultural systems is, thus, an ongoing, adaptive process of enabling farming households
and members of agricultural production and consumption chains to respond to the changing
needs and preferences of consumers and citizens, through flexible combinations of farming
models, and provision of a suite of public goods and agricultural functions at regional level.
It is a process, rather than an end goal.
The notion that multiple functions and public goods could and should be provided
through agricultural systems is a foundational tenet of EU agricultural policy (van
Huylenbroek and Durand, 2003). A considerable volume of academic literature over the
past decade has identified the multiple functions provided by agriculture as key to
sustainability in agricultural systems (see in particular van Huylenbroek and Durand, 2003;
Brouwer and van der Heide, 2009 for reviews of the multifunctional agriculture literature).
Indeed, this was the initial premise of both the TOPMARD and MULTAGRI EU
Framework 6 projects, as well as conceptual work by Wilson (2007, 2008). However, to
date analyses of multifunctionality in agriculture have focused primarily at the macro level,
on policies developed to promote or support multiple functions in agriculture (Potter and
Burney, 2002; Brouwer, 2004; Potter and Tilzey, 2005), with some work at farm level, to
evaluate the degree to which multifunctional transitions are occurring on the ground
(Wilson, 2007, 2008).
In line with Clark (2005, 2006) we suggest that the multiple functions and public goods
provided through agricultural systems should be assessed and enabled at regional level. In
light of the increasing demands on agriculture, we argue that it is not reasonable to expect
each individual farm or farming system to attempt to meet all of these demands. Neither is
it acceptable to have entire regions where some of these demands - such as public access,
local food production or maintenance of soil and water quality - are not met, as might be
the case if public goods and multiple functions were pursued primarily at national or
European levels. Instead, we propose that sustainability can best be addressed by enabling
regions to optimize the specific opportunity sets embedded in those regions (e.g. natural
resources, farm structures and farming systems, landscape and ecological conditions,
infrastructure and economic development, social capital, institutional arrangements,
governance structures). Linked to this, the particular issues of sustainability to be addressed
will vary between regions and through time within the same region. For example, in some
regions productivist agriculture is still the dominant activity, where issues of sustainability
relate to increasing farm size and ecological degradation resulting from intensive
production. In other regions, more commonly remote or peripheral regions, other activities
such as hunting or nature related recreation/tourism are already taking over as management
goals for some farm units. In yet other regions, subsistence farming, as well as