Trandisciplinary development of pathways towards sustainability in agriculture

Abstract

Transdisciplinarity is a demanding form of knowledge integration and it is dependent on reflectivity. It requires a non-idealized perception of the objects of research, a reflection on the specific limitations of the disciplinary construction of reality. Only then can researchers possibly deal with these constructions as problems that can be approached from a diversity of different angles, each one legitimate in its own right and capable of contributing partial knowledge of the object, but none able to define the problem as such from a disciplinary perspective. While focusing in the process of transition to sustainability farming, transdisciplinarity is a key element since the subject requires a dynamic and evolving effort to address the symbiosis between human activity and the environment, providing visions and scenarios, indicating pathways while elucidating stakeholders. The above premise has been applied in FarmPath (Farming Transitions: Pathways towards regional sustainability of agriculture in Europe) project aiming at the study of transitions to sustainability in agriculture. FarmPath' is a three year collaborative research project funded through European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme, which is running from March 2011 to February 2014. The focus of FarmPath is the provision of the necessary insights to make the normative concept of sustainability operational, and the means to plan and implement adequate steps towards this end. Taking this into account, in this article we explore the project results from the perspective of operationalization of a transdisciplinarity approach. To achieve this we gathered the insights obtained by the application of the same process towards transdisciplinarity in seven different countries: Portugal, Bulgaria, Check Republic, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Greece.