General Introduction - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 11

multiple goals, and yet—because of the human activity component in them—the
goals are often competing and sometimes conflicting. Thus, the goal-seeking and
self-organizing behaviors of agroecosystems occur in a series of trade-offs and bal-
ances with inherent contradictions.
An agroecosystem health assessment is undertaken to help people make better
decisions regarding managing the agroecosystems in which they live and grow food
(Waltner-Toews et al., 2000). It follows that the perspectives of the primary managers
of agroecosystems are the most managerially useful descriptions of the agroecosys-
tem. Furthermore, these descriptions incorporate in them the value judgments, goals,
and objectives of the primary managers of the system. Recent developments in par-
ticipatory (Chambers, 1989, 1994) and action research (Greenwood and Levin, 1998;
Stringer, 1999) methods provide means through which farmers and other members
of the community in an agroecosystem can be involved in the process.
Soft systems methodology, developed by management specialist Peter Check-
land (Checkland and Scholes, 1990), provides a systems approach to the manage-
ment of complex situations in which (1) multiple perspectives exist, (2) there is
no consensus on what the problem is, (3) no single solution can be agreed on, and
(4) multiple competing or conflicting goals exist. Soft systems methodology can be
used—in combination with participatory and action research methods—to build a
community-centered process that resolves the issues of multiple perspectives and
multiple goals within an agroecosystem health research process.
The issue of scale and trade-offs among holons within and between levels is
difficult to resolve. At what scale should an agroecosystem health assessment be car-
ried out? Which levels and which units must be healthy and sustainable, and which
must be traded off? Focusing on particular scales may lead to inappropriate conclu-
sions regarding lower or higher levels in the hierarchy. The choice of scale should be
guided by the questions that initiated the concern for health and sustainability. For
example, concern about the health and sustainability of a smallholder-dominated
agroecosystem calls for attention at the farm level and the community or watershed
level. The latter level is because this is where there is a degree of integration in terms
of social and economic factors, and the former is because most decisions are made
at this level. Izac and Swift (1994) propose that to understand sustainability at one
level, there is a need to understand the level above and the one below.
1.4.4 i n D i C A t of r s
In human and animal health, the diagnostic process involves taking measurements
on specific parameters and comparing them with ranges in a healthy individual.
Ecosystem health proposes a similar approach by which the spatiotemporal trends
of health attributes or their proxies—known as indicators —are assessed (Rapport
and Regier, 1980; Odum, 1983; Rapport et al., 1985; Swindale, 1992; Izac and Swift,
1994; Winograd, 1994; van Bruschem, 1997; Aldy et al., 1998; Smit et al., 1998).
Gallopin (1994a) described an indicator as a variable and defined a variable as an
operational representation of an attribute of a system. A variable has a set of possible
outcomes, by which thresholds, standards, and targets are several such outcomes
singled out because of their special relevance to the condition of the system.