General Introduction - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 17

and poverty, which in turn leads to the adoption of even more untenable resource
management strategies.
Understanding the impact of different development strategies will require an
adaptive, integrated, and systemic approach with both short-term and long-term
monitoring and evaluation strategies. Farmers and communities—who are the pri-
mary managers of the agroecosystem—must be involved in the process both as local
experts and as users of the local theory generated by the adaptive process. The agro-
ecosystem health framework, incorporating the concept of sustainability and involv-
ing participatory, action research and soft systems methodologies, seems to be a
suitable framework for the design and implementation of such a process.
Questions regarding the health and sustainability of smallholder-dominated
agroecosystems go beyond surplus production and the viability of farm units. They
are more fundamental: How should communities manage agroecosystems, not
only to derive their livelihoods from them but also to conserve them and maintain
them for posterity? These issues are broad and include human health and nutrition;
employment; rural-urban migration; sociocultural capital; regional, gender, and
intergenerational equity; and the environment. Tackling these requires a multifac-
eted approach incorporating policy, infrastructure development, and governance. An
integrated, adaptive, and participatory process for assessing health and sustainabil-
ity of an agroecosystem would therefore be a process to empower the people who
live there, giving them command and control as the primary managers. Such an
approach would provide them with the information and analytic capacity from which
to negotiate goals and objectives, influence policy and demand services, as well as
structure their collective actions toward better livelihood outcomes.
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