Development of Health and Sustainability Indicators for a Tropical Highlands Agroecosystem - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 149

Participatory workshops

Multidisciplinary
team

Descriptions of the
agroecosystems

Potential indicators

Agroecosystem problems,
concerns, goals and
objectives

Initial list of
potential
indicators

Researcher-proposed
indicators

Community-driven
indicators

Selection
criteria

Measurement

Correspondence
analysis

Measurement

Evaluation

Refined list of
researcher-proposed
indicators

Integrated
assessment

Key

Italics = Community-drive process; Normal = Predominantly research-drive process
Bold = Participatory process

fIGuRe 6.1 Flowchart showing the approaches in which indicators of agroecosystem
health and sustainability were developed.

6.2.1 D e v e l of p m e n t of f C o m m u n i t y -D r i v e n i n D i C A t of r s
The rationale for developing community-driven indicators was that communities
must assess their own agroecosystems for the process to be sustainable. However,
indicators selected by researchers may not be practical for use by the communities.
Communities in the six intensive study sites were facilitated to develop a suite of
indicators that they would use to monitor the health and sustainability of their agro-
ecosystems. These indicators were developed in 3-day workshops held in each of the
six intensive villages in July to August 1998. Gender- and age-specific focus group
discussions were used in conjunction with pairwise ranking and trend analysis to
identify health attributes of most concern to the residents, list potential indicators,
and then refine the list to a parsimonious suite. The sequence of participatory tools