Design and Implementation of an Adaptive, Integrated Approach to Health and Sustainability in a Smallholder-Dominated Agroecosystem - Integrated Assessment of Health and Sustainability of Agroecosystems - page 26

indicators, reassessing the situation, and implementing desired changes (Bellamy
et al., 1996; Waltner-Toews and Nielsen, 1997).
A systemic description is a model, built using conventional systems theory (Bel-
lamy et al., 1996), the purpose of which is to describe the behavior of the agroeco-
system. Agroecosystems, however, can be viewed and interpreted from a variety of
nonequivalent perspectives (Waltner-Toews et al., 2000), giving rise to multiple—
conflicting or complementing—descriptions (Gitau et al., 1998). Since farmers and
communities are the primary managers of the agroecosystem, a managerially useful
description is likely to be a synthesis of their perspectives. Colearning tools such
as action research (Stringer, 1999) provide means through which such a synthesis
can be achieved. By incorporating the primary managers in a collegial participa-
tory process (Biggs, 1989), action research methods provide the framework through
which implementation of desired changes and reassessment of the situation can be
carried out.
Agroecosystem goals are a reflection of what are considered desirable states for
the agroecosystem (Bellamy et al., 1996). According to Haworth et al. (1998), agro-
ecosystem goals can be derived in three ways. The first is a purely subjective process
by which expectations for the agroecosystem are decided on a priori based on what
is generally regarded as the purpose of the agroecosystem. In the second way the
human participants of an agroecosystem form expectations for that agroecosystem.
In this sense, system goals are the expected outcomes of transformations that agro-
ecosystem users, owners, or managers would undertake to modify the agroecosys-
tem to optimize the benefits they derive from it. Another way of generating system
goals is to study the way the agroecosystem functions, with the selection of system
goals a matter of elucidating the goals inherent in the system itself. The three meth-
ods represent different points of a continuum; the choice is dependent on the nature
of the agroecosystem under study. Whichever way is used to derive system goals,
the account of agroecosystem health will consist of a list of goals, a description
of the agroecosystem's capacity to meet those expectations, coupled with a list of
indicators that enable one to decide how well the system is meeting the expectations
(Haworth et al., 1998). Data gathered using these indicators then serve as a basis for
refining the system descriptions and management goals (and therefore the indicators
themselves) in an iterative, feedback process.
The use of indicators to study complex phenomena is widely accepted (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).
Their use is complicated by the fact that agroecosystem health is system and scale
specific, making the choice of indicators and their interpretation similarly specific.
In addition, there is a virtually infinite list of potential indicators. What is needed to
implement the broad ideas of health and sustainability is not so much another list of
indicators to measure but an integrated framework within which such indicators can
be developed and interpreted (Waltner-Toews, 1991). Without a conceptual model
that provides a framework for selecting indicators, specifying the data collection and
calculation methodologies and a process for synthesizing all the information into
a picture of the system, the overall status of the system cannot be assessed (Boyle
et al., 2000).