Introduction - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 9

abandonment of farming and of the land area in general, are the dominant processes
(Wilson, 2001). Even within a region, challenges to economic, social and environmental
sustainability are bound to vary through time, for example, as new scientific evidence
becomes available, as markets shift or as societal awareness and expectations evolve. As
Robinson (2008) has highlighted, definitions of sustainability of agriculture are, therefore,
inevitably region specific as are the pathways to achieve economic, ecological and social
sustainability. The research in this topic will provide an evidence-base to support this
definition of sustainability and identify mechanisms to enable transitions towards achieving
it.
Conceptualizing emerging transition processes
Over the last two decades, a number of theoretical and methodological perspectives
associated with attempts to enable transition to more sustainable agriculture are discernible.
The more distant roots lie in mono-disciplinary studies which often highlighted problems of
water quality and quantity, declining biodiversity, landscape change and land
fragmentation, but which have rarely effected transformative change and major leaps
forward in sustainability. More recently, different practitioners from multiple disciplinary
backgrounds have endeavoured to develop multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary
approaches to create sustainability science as a means of addressing the need for
transformations towards more sustainable practices. These approaches have included
ecological modernization (Mol and Sonnenfield, 2000), exploration of resilience (Berkes et
al ., 2003; Darnohofer et al ., 2010; Wilson, 2012) and Ostrom's (2005) Institutional
Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. These approaches have in common the
emphasis on transdisciplinary perspectives on resource management, the need for
transformative action in response to compromised socio-ecological sustainability, the
importance of institutional analysis at multiple scales and the need for stakeholder
engagement in an iterative, collaborative and comprehensive way. In the 2000s, the
literature on sustainable niche management, transition management and the MLP has grown
to prominence, founded on science and technology studies.
Assessment of transition in the agricultural sector has been somewhat less d eveloped,
with the few studies tending to focus on the development of niche innovations (e.g.
Wiskerke and van der Ploeg, 2004; Knickel et al ., 2009), organic farming (Belz, 2004;
Smith, 2006, 2007), individual farm-level transitions (Wilson, 2007, 2008) or specific
national phenomena (Poppe et al ., 2009). In this topic, we focus on 'emerging transitions' -
niches which have developed past the novelty stage and which are impacting on the
agricultural sector at regional level. Our interest is on niche-regime interactions, in other
words how niches and regimes co-develop in response to changed socio-technical
landscape conditions. Change in agricultural systems have been widely explored at the
macro level in recent literature on food regimes, particularly emphasizing the roles of
markets, large retailers and government import/export strategies in the development of agr i-
food systems (Friedmann, 2009; McMichael, 2009). There is also an extensive body of
literature at the meso level, addressing changes in farming systems, and the role of retailers,
processors and consumers in the production and consumption chains. At the micro (farm)
level, sustainable transitions have been identified through a variety of approaches, most