Characterizing agroecological farming systems by combining the resilience and ESR framework

Industrialized agriculture depends on increasingly scarce external inputs like water, fuel and articial fertilizers. Furthermore, literature describes negative externalities and a lack of food security and sovereignty associated with this type of agriculture. An expanding academic eld suggests agroecology as a possible solution to these problems. In this study, we investigate how and why dierent farming systems apply agroecological principles in the context of Flanders. Choices made by farmers and in uencing factors will be analyzed from a socio-economic view, using a farming systems diagnostics study approach. From an extensive literature search, we selected promising frameworks to guide the study. We build on Darnhofer et al. (2010) and use resilience thinking as a framework for assessing a farm's sustainability. As agroecological farming systems are characterized as production systems which are locally embedded and adaptable to ensure continuity within a changing world, these systems are assumed to be resilient. Characterizing farming systems by their resilience strategies can be an approach for distinguishing more agroecological systems from more conventional ones.

By combining the resilience framework with the eciency-substitution-redesign framework (ESR), we investigate how resilience strategies can be linked with these three production sys- tems and how strategies evolve when moving from one stage to another. Besides a timescale, we use the multilevel perspective to study how farm level strategies interrelate with other levels, such as niche initiatives over policy to regime pressures or landscape drivers.

Because of the dynamic aspect, the most interesting case-studies are converting farms, ap- plying more or less agroecological principles over a certain time span. Data from in-depth interviews about production systems, major changes, causes and eects, will be analyzed and conceptualized by the above described framework. This more holistic way of representing agroecology and determining in uencing factors can support the implementation of more agroecological practices.