General Discussion - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 201

development fit into a standard project time frame. Longer-term issues, such as clear-
cut assessments of sustainability, require longer-term monitoring mechanisms. It is
difficult to judge how lessons learned in one set of communities can be generalized
to other communities and agroecosystems. In our view, the process is transferable
with fairly moderate adaptive changes. Some of the lessons may be instructive in the
management and assessment of similar agroecosystems, but this will become clear
as more studies of this nature are undertaken, compared, and contrasted.
The holistic approach adopted in this process, while essential to establish the
crucial context for decisions and priorities, means that researchers and development
agents with narrowly defined terms of reference will not be able or willing to use this
approach, especially if their priorities are not strongly linked with those of the target
communities. Agroecosystem health assessments can be initiated under the umbrella
of agencies (such as the National Agricultural Research Service [NARS]) that have
broader terms of reference, while those with narrower focus are best integrated in a
secondary process based on the outcomes of the initial assessments and analyses.
The key lesson for communities is that the health approach to community descrip-
tion, problem analysis, and action planning only works if the community is commit-
ted to and leads the process. All communities had some success with this approach,
mainly related to their organizational ability and commitment. The participatory
techniques for analyzing, planning, and monitoring action plans were effective and
contributed to community mobilization and action. Communities also discovered
that they could learn effectively from the experiences of other communities. Thus,
strategies to foster intervillage collaboration need to be an important feature of such
efforts. Researchers from all disciplines involved in this project appreciated the abil-
ity of communities to formulate “research” questions and analyze constraints. This
approach provides an important pathway for developing relevant research questions.
In addition, the perspective and ability of communities to analyze their problems
were impressive and can be an important tool for researchers trying to assess com-
plex issues using soft systems and more traditional multivariate approaches.
8.6 summaRy
The increasing realization that human activities have complex impacts on the health
and sustainability of agricultural and ecological systems has led to the increasing
interest in holistic and adaptive approaches in the management of human activity
systems. The results presented in this study strongly illustrate that such holistic
approaches are feasible and demonstrate the potential of the agroecosystem health
paradigm as a framework for incorporating these concerns into the decision-making
processes of agricultural communities in a tropical highlands agroecosystem.