Mapping the pathways towards farm-level sustainable intensification of agriculture: an exploratory network 3 analysis of stakeholders’ views

Sustainable intensification of agriculture (SIA) has become an important concept to ensuring food security in the context of increasing agricultural production while minimising negative externalities in contemporary agronomic systems. In supporting this, there is a need to establish a decision-making and management system that involves the views and opinions of different stakeholders and unifies the goals of SIA amongst them. The objective of this work is to identify and describe pathways toward farm-level SIA. An explanatory network approach and fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) support the analysis of stakeholder views across the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental. Different stakeholder groups were asked to collectively map the pathways towards farm level SIA in a workshop exercise. The respective groups considered a common set of pre-selected factors as potential descriptors of sustainability and created unique maps by adding their own components and descriptors and identifying causal links between them. While the relative weighting of factors by each group differed, according to their perspectives and interpretation, yield, knowledge transfer, water quality, weather extremes and technology/infrastructure were scored as priority descriptors of farm-level sustainability by all groups in an aggregate analysis. Exploratory analysis of FCMs was found to provide an efficient mechanism to investigate stakeholder views on pathways towards farm-level SIA, by identifying causal relationships and interactions between factors and actors that affect its achievement. The study shows that sustainable intensification is a complex dynamic system that includes institutional structures, personal goals, stakeholder interests and socio-economic factors, and is affected by cognitive beliefs and particular knowledge within stakeholder groups. Our results show how experience, knowledge and beliefs affect the perception of farm-level SIA by various stakeholder groups, and how this knowledge is often fragmented and miscommunicated. The exercise confirmed the hypothesis that farm-level SIA has to be seen as a dynamic process in which farm performance is affected by various factors, with the complexity of the process increasing when different stakeholder interests and beliefs combine for farm management.