Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

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The resignification process of Agroecology:

Competing narratives from governments, civil
society and intergovernmental organizations

Marta G. Rivera-Ferre

To cite this article: Marta G. Rivera-Ferre (2018) The resignification process of

Agroecology: Competing narratives from governments, civil society and intergovernmental
organizations, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 42:6, 666-685, DOI:
10.1080/21683565.2018.1437498

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AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS
2018, VOL. 42, NO. 6, 666–685
https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2018.1437498

The resignification process of Agroecology: Competing

narratives from governments, civil society and
intergovernmental organizations
Marta G. Rivera-Ferre
Chair Agroecology and Food Systems, University of Vic-Central University of Catalonia, Spain; The
Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, Coventry, England

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The definition of Agroecology as a science, as a movement, Received 28 June 2017
and as a practice is widely accepted worldwide. But these three Revised 8 January 2018
approaches are in fact interrelated elements which cannot be Accepted 2 February 2018
separated one from the others. They rather articulate among KEYWORDS
them to reflect different mental models and narratives all will- Political agroecology;
ing to tackle the unsustainability of food systems. However, sustainable food systems;
this fragmentation, together with the late development of lexicometric; narratives
policy proposals to promote agroecology at higher scales
(political agroecology), has facilitated the emergence of differ-
ent narratives in the political area, in a process of resignifica-
tion of what is agroecology. Through a lexicometric analysis of
policy documents from different political actors (civil society,
governments, and intergovernmental organizations) which
self-claim to promote agroecology, I identify five narratives in
the political arena, which put different emphasis on the differ-
ent dimensions of agroecology and on different scales (from
farm to the food system).

Introduction
Different interpretations and definitions of agroecology are currently used
worldwide. They include agroecology as a practice, agroecology as a move-
ment, and agroecology as a scientific discipline, including approaches varying
from the plot/field and the agroecosystem to the food system (Bellamy and
Ioris 2017; Méndez et al. 2016; Wezel et al. 2009; Wezel and Jauneau 2011).
The evolution of the interpretations and definitions is often linked to differ-
ences in the historical development of agroecology in different countries and
regions of the world (Wezel and Jauneau 2011). This multidimensional
approximation has also been adopted by international organizations, as
FAO, and panel of experts (IPES-Food 2016). But in fact, this multidimen-
sional approach what reflects is the great complexity of agriculture and
suggests that different actors put different emphasis on the diverse functions

CONTACT Marta G. Rivera-Ferre martaguadalupe.rivera@uvic.cat Chair Agroecology and Food Systems,

C/la Laura 13,08500 Vic, Barcelona, Spain.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/wjsa.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 667

that agriculture has in society (Rivera-Ferre, Ortega-Cerdà, and Baumgärtner

2013). This triple interpretation also reflects in practice what Rivera-Ferre
(2012) described as the components of decision-making processes in agri-
culture within the knowledge society: (1) assessment (science and knowl-
edge); (2) management, including institutions/governance, social systems,
and legislation; and (3) practices, related to production (including technolo-
gies), distribution, and markets. These elements are all interconnected and
cannot be separated, generally reflecting in a coherent manner a narrative or
mental model. In that manner, assessments generally evaluate and are con-
ditioned by agricultural practices to provide information to the management,
which in turn affects agricultural practices. Rivera-Ferre (2012) stated that
given that all these three elements are affected by and reflect different mental
models and associated narratives, it is important to make explicit what
narrative we mean to when referring to agriculture. In the same line, given
the different descriptions of agroecology in all the different approximations,
Wezel et al. (2009) suggested to identify to what type of agroecology we refer
to (science, movement, practice) when referring to agroecology. However,
Wezel et al. (2009) assumed that within each of the approximations he
suggests (science, practice, movement), the discourses are also homogenous,
while I suggest this is not the case. That is, defining agroecology as a science,
as a movement, or as a practice is a form of hiding the narratives behind each
of the agroecology approximations, and thus the final objective of each of
them. To be precise, this fragmented approach hides the different discourses
or narratives that currently exist within agroecology, in the same way they
exist for agriculture as a whole (Rivera-Ferre 2012). Thus, what we have are
different agroecological narratives which imply different scientific approxi-
mations and different framing of practices that result in different policy-
proposals. This is so because all three: science, practice and movement (as a
political dimension) are intertwined, and the form they organise reflects one
narrative or other. In this article, I reflect on the implications for policy-
making that the definition of agroecology as fragmented multiple approaches
has in oppose to acknowledging the existence of different narratives aiming
to re-signify what is agroecology for them. To do this, I center on political
agroecology and perform a lexicometric analysis of policy-related documents
from different political actors. A better understanding of what the different
narratives are within agroecology and their final objectives of transforming
(or not) the food system can better contribute to developing coherent and
out-of-the-box policies toward sustainable food systems.

Narratives behind agroecology

From a general perspective, agroecology is understood as an alternative to
conventional high input or industrialized agriculture and the unsustainability
668 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

of food systems and, thus, can be perceived as a homogenous discourse.

However, agroecology has different meanings for different actors depending
on the emphasis given to the different functions of agriculture and its
transformative potential (Levidow, Pimbert, and Vanloqueren 2014) resulting
in different “agroecologies” (Méndez, Bacon, and Cohen 2013). These
agroecologies have different forms: agroecology that transforms or conforms
the food system (Levidow, Pimbert, and Vanloqueren 2014), reformist and
radical agroecology (Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2013), strong and weak
agroecology (López-i-Gelats et al. 2016). In a broader sense, these diverse
trends in agroecology reflect what Rivera-Ferre (2012), in a simplification
exercise, described as the different type of framings existing in agri-food
research: official/orthodox versus alternative, but in this particular case,
sharing the object of study: small-scale agriculture. According to her, “official
framings” tend to separate social and natural sciences, are more simplistic in
the analysis, and usually regard solutions as technical rather than social and/
or political, while alternative framings tend to be inter/trans-disciplinary,
where agri-food system are conceived as complex systems and have a higher
participation of social and political sciences. Méndez, Bacon, and Cohen
(2013) described this divergent trend for the case of agroecology. Thus, we
have not three different uses or approaches of agroecology, but different
narratives of what is agroecology and each of these narratives approaches in
different forms the science and knowledge, the practices and the policies
linked to it. From a political agroecology perspective, this has theoretical and
practical consequences.
To understand the emergence of these dichotomies, it is necessary to
consider the evolution of agroecology. Indeed, although the foundations of
agroecology should be sought close to agrarian sciences, the complexity of
the domain tackled quickly triggered the widening of the focus of interest.
New dimensions of agroecology showed up, more concerned with promoting
social transformations, rather than just with mere agricultural practices.
These dimensions were summarized as ecological and techno-productive,
socioeconomic and cultural, and sociopolitical (Ottman 2005; Sevilla
Guzmán 2006). The ecological and techno-productive dimension focuses
on the farm and the design of agroecosystems based on ecological principles,
the socioeconomic and cultural dimension is centered on the endogenous
development of rural communities, and the political dimension works in the
construction of alternatives to industrial agriculture through collective
action. One way to assess the mental models behind the different narratives
of the different agroecologies is to look at which dimensions of agroecology
all these approximations refer to and how they approach them.
(a) Agroecology as a scientific discipline
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 669

As a scientific discipline, agroecology studies how the different agroecosys-

tem components interact (Altieri 1989). Here, its own evolution and the
different disciplines working behind it reflect different objectives of what
agroecology is and should be, and its relation to change, from incremental to
transformative and thus, different narratives. From its very beginning, in
which the term agroecology was used to describe the use of ecological
methods on commercial crop plants and was first defined as the “basic
science of soil conservation” (Bensin 1938, in López-i-Gelats and Tábara,
2010), agroecology as a science has been identified as the link among
agricultural and ecological sciences, facilitating the interaction of ecologists
and agronomists. Early in the 1990s, Gliessman (1990) proposed to conceive
agroecology as the implementation of the ecological principles to the under-
standing and developing of sustainable agroecosystems. Here, agroecosys-
tems can be described as systems of human appropriation of nature to exploit
several human-valued goods and services (Toledo 1992). Agroecology, thus,
should be placed, as proposed by Garrido Peña (1993), within a new emer-
ging paradigm: the ecological paradigm, which later allowed the introduction
of complex and sustainability sciences within agronomic sciences (Rivera-
Ferre, Ortega-Cerdà, and Baumgärtner 2013). From this starting point, one
narrative of agroecology as a science has kept maintaining the ecological
(techno-productive) dimension of agroecology, while others have incorpo-
rated more complexity in the analyses (Méndez, Bacon, and Cohen 2013) by
integrating all three dimensions (ecological and techno-productive, socio-
economic and cultural, and sociopolitical). In this manner, as a science, other
interpretations emerged regarding what is agroecology under this general
objective of tackling the unsustainability of agroecosystems. These views put
more emphasis on the social (including cultural) components of the agroe-
cosystem. For instance, while Pierre Rabhi’s approach was built on ecology, it
was explicitly grounded in the tradition of anthroposophy (Steiner 1984) and
indigenous cosmovisions, emphasizing a life affirmative ethics with a central
focus on the Earth (Rabhi 1989, in Pimbert 2015). Sevilla Guzmán (1997)
agroecology’s pluri-epistemological nature is understood as an organized
manner to create and employ knowledge that accepts different forms of
knowledge. In this sense, agroecology as a science also builds a critique of
conventional agronomic sciences. It criticizes its partiality in terms of knowl-
edge creation and its lack of recognition of the role of local traditional and
indigenous knowledge to the development of sustainable agri-food systems.
Sevilla Guzmán (1997) conceived agroecology as a fertile attempt to integrate
social and natural sciences to elaborate a strategy of (post)development
compatible with the environment. From this perspective, agroecology pio-
neered agronomic sciences by introducing complexity and sustainability
sciences within the analysis of agri-food systems (Rivera-Ferre, Ortega-
Cerdà, and Baumgärtner 2013). From these more social sciences perspectives,
670 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

agroecology is the cornerstone for designing alternative systems of agricul-

ture, which are implemented at the production level and are being dissemi-
nated by collective social action. Agroecology, thus, “analyzes the
agroecosystems and experiences aiming at examining in which cases the
management leads toward adequate ways of social and ecological reproduc-
tion” (Sevilla Guzmán 1997) implicitly advocating for social justice and the
system’s transformation as an objective of agroecology. This narrative of
“Agroecology as a science” also follows the postulates of postnormal science
proposed by Funtowicz and Ravetz (1991) helping to create linkages with the
“agroecology as a practice” (Warner 2008) and “agroecology as a movement”
in order to develop rural policies tackling social and economic processes
(Altieri 1989), thus integrating all the three dimensions of agroecology. Thus,
this interpretation integrates all three dimensions of Agroecology. Thus, this
interpretation integrates all three dimensions of Agroecology. More recently,
agroecology as a scientific discipline went through a strong change, moving
beyond the agroecosystems toward a larger focus on the whole food system
(Francis et al. 2003; Wezel et al. 2014a). In that manner, Gliessman (2007)
redefined agroecology as “the science of applying ecological concepts and
principles to the design and management of sustainable food systems.” A
food system approach inevitably calls for a greater integration of social and
natural sciences. Whether this approach can help to approximate narratives
within the scientific epistemologies of agroecology (Hatt et al. 2016) is
something to be assessed.
(b) Agroecology as agricultural practice
In the definition of agroecology as agricultural practices, we might consider
that these practices have been widely used for a long time, but it is only in the
last decades that they have been described as agroecological practices (Wezel
et al. 2014b). Thus, whether implicitly or explicitly, they are rooted in local
traditional knowledge of peasant and indigenous cultures. As a defined
corpus of practices and techniques, rooted in ecological processes, which
aims at developing a more “environmental-friendly” or “sustainable” agri-
culture, agroecology as agricultural practices emerged in the 1980s (Wezel
et al. 2009). Precisely, the extraction of these practices as separated elements
from their socio-environmental context facilitates the uptake of these prac-
tices by different actors in different contexts (Wezel et al. 2014b). Currently,
the definition of agroecology as agricultural practices also shows explicit
divergences. If we analyze how different proposals claiming to address the
unsustainability of current agriculture and food systems refer to “agroecolo-
gical practices,” then it is clear that different visions of what agroecological
practices mean do exist and how they can be easily adopted by different
narratives related to agriculture and food systems. At its origins, agroecology
as a practice was often intertwined with movements (Gliessman 2013; Wezel
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 671

et al. 2009), defining agroecology as a collective practice of agriculture which

explicitly considered economic, social, environmental, and ecological aspects,
based on traditional peasants’ knowledge to promote endogenous develop-
ment, but open to innovations that help sustainability (Sevilla-Guzmán and
Martínez-Alier 2006; Sevilla-Guzman and Woodgate, 2013). This definition
of “agroecology as a practice” shows a mental model that clearly sees the
linkages and interactions among all three approaches (science, movement,
practice) and dimensions (ecological and techno-productive, socioeconomic
and cultural, and sociopolitical) of agroecology. Some examples exist in the
literature reflecting agroecology as a practice from this narrative (Altieri et al.
2012; Altieri and Nicholls 2008; Altieri, Nicholls, and Montalba 2017). But
Levidow, Pimbert, and Vanloqueren (2014) show how agroecological prac-
tices have been appropriated to accommodate other discourses promoting
“sustainable agroecosystems” which conform rather than transform the sys-
tem. For instance, Lampkin et al. (2015), after an intense review of agroeco-
logical practices, suggest that they can make a substantial contribution to the
concept of sustainable intensification. Indeed, Levidow (2015) shows that the
sustainable intensification agenda in Europe selectively incorporates agroe-
cological practices together with genetically modified (GM) crops or no-till
with the broader objective of making conventional agro-food chains more
environmentally sustainable. However, by appropriating these practices for
productivist aims, sustainable intensification blurs the distinction between an
agroecological agenda and a Green Revolution capital-intensive agenda
(Holt-Giménez and Altieri 2013). In the same line, Pimbert (2015) showed
that the concept of climate smart agriculture (CSA), which advocates for
agroecological practices so as to promote adaptation to climate change while
ensuring food security through sustainable agriculture, integrates practices
which cannot be accepted within agroecology. He shows some discourse
similarities between CSA advocates and agroecology in terms of the need
for producing food through practices enhancing a sustainable use of natural
resources that contribute to reduced emissions and less deforestation, while
accepting the need to develop approaches embedded in the local contexts and
rejecting universal one-size-fits-all solutions. However, he also shows that
along with environmentally friendly agroforestry and intercropping practices,
CSA also incorporates practices and technologies incompatible with the
agroecology discourse, such as the use of herbicide-tolerant crops, toxic
insecticides and fungicides or GM seeds, and genetically engineered livestock
and fish. This mix of concepts and proposals around agroecological practices
creates confusion and divergent discourses about what they include.
Understanding agroecology as a science only or as a practice only leads to the
promotion of technology-based solutions rather than institutional or social
change-based solutions for the problems considered today by the global agro-
food system (Gonzalez De Molina 2013). If we trace back the origins of the
672 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

sustainable intensification and CSA proposals, they too promoted “only” tech-
nological solutions toward sustainable agriculture. But the lack of recognition of
an explicit political dimension, where technical solutions need to be embedded,
has favored the cooptation of such proposals by the conventional industrialized
system, contributing to the configuration of what is known as a corporate
environmental food regime (Friedmann 2005). In terms of policy-making,
concepts such as sustainable intensification and CSA facilitate the work of
those policy-makers (and governments) that feel more comfortable developing
policies that favor incremental rather than transformational change. But agroe-
cology is different. As a movement, it has a political dimension with the clear
objective of transforming the food system in order to achieve sustainability.
(c) Agroecology as a social movement
As a movement, the foundations of agroecology are deeply rooted in the long
history of peasant practices, discourses and struggles against to industrial
agriculture. Indeed, agroecology as a movement has evolved with the peasant
movement and the historical peasant opposition to agricultural modernization
(López-i-Gelats et al. 2016). Not in vain, the shift from traditional to industrial
agriculture can be conceived as a gradual process of penetration of the capitalist
rationality into peasant social structures. This process has gone hand in hand
with resistance movements all around the world which have embraced agroe-
cology (Gliessman 2013; Rosset and Martínez-Torres 2012; Sevilla-Guzmán and
Martínez-Alier 2006). Here is where the discourse is probably more homoge-
neous. But agroecology as a movement has also a more recent root in the
environmental movements that went against industrial agriculture in the 1960s
(Wezel et al. 2009) and here the focus is not so much on rural development and
equity, but rather on ecology and environmentalism. Agroecology as a move-
ment is now widely represented by the food sovereignty movement as seen in
2015 when this movement published its own vision of what agroecology meant
for them (Niélény 2015). In this narrative, agroecology represents the model of
agriculture that can contribute to building food sovereignty (Altieri 2009),
including both a focus on rural development and equity, but also on ecology
and environment since the food sovereignty movement merges a diverse set of
societal actors which range from peasants, women, and consumers movements
to environmental, cooperation, or human rights NGOs. The recognition that an
“agroecology as a movement” exists is, from a political agroecology perspective,
a strength and an opportunity for agroecology to contribute to changing system
structures and should help in finding commonalities in the discourses and
narratives around what is agroecology (and what is not).
But if we adopt the frame proposed by Rivera-Ferre (2012) in which the
triangle assessment-management-practices are all intertwined, we could
assimilate the agroecology as a movement with the management (policies)
part of the triangle. Inevitably, that means to focus not only on social
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 673

movements but also on a more broad variety of political actors and institu-
tions, including the administration. In other words, it implies to speak of
agroecology in the political arena.

Political agroecology: Agroecology in the policy arena

By definition, the approach of agroecology as a movement forms part of
what is known as political agroecology, that is the link between politics
and agroecology. Political agroecology should facilitate the development of
policies promoting agroecology at different scales, by promoting socio-
economic structural reforms toward sustainable agri-food systems.
However, the agroecological movement has been characterized until
recently by the scarcity of political proposals that go beyond the local
scale (Gonzalez De Molina 2013). But in the last few years, agroecology
has entered in policy discourses on food and farming and has begun to be
adopted by different political actors, including social movements, interna-
tional organizations and governments. Clearly, the International
Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for
Development (IAASTD) report (McIntyre et al. 2009) meant a turning
point in the introduction of agroecology within the policy-making arena.
Being an UN-led panel of experts aiming to assess the role of agricultural
knowledge in promoting sustainable development, it stated that locally
based innovations and agroecological approaches were essential to reduce
the global food system vulnerabilities. After the IAASTD report was
published, several official institutions advocated for agroecology and new
forms of farming, such as the European Union’s Standing Committee on
Agricultural Research (EU Scar 2012), or the UN Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food, who has also helped put agroecology on the map of the
international community and policy-makers (De Schutter 2010). Currently,
the adoption by the food sovereignty movement has prompted the propo-
sal of larger scale options for agroecological policies.
But from a political agroecology perspective aiming to build policies to
favor the construction of agroecology, the co-existence of different narratives
defining agroecology, favoured by its fragmentation into the three mentioned
approaches, has prompted the co-optation of agroecology-linked alternatives
by mainstream and official proposals, as has occurred with the agroecology as
a practice and agroecology as a science approaches. This poses difficulties to
give a coherent message about what agroecological policies may look like and
has facilitated the emergence of divergent approaches of policies to promote
agroecology, some highly contested by social and peasant movements. To
shed light on this trend, in this article, I analyze narratives behind active
political actors in charge of developing policy proposals to expand
agroecology.
674 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

Methodology
To analyze the emerging discourses in political agroecology, I analyzed docu-
ments (from official documents or websites) published by different political
actors who self-state they are working to promote agroecology: the food
sovereignty movement (as a civil society actor), the United Nations Food
and Agriculture Organization (FAO, as an international intergovernmental
organization), and governments which have developed agroecology laws at
the national level.
For the food sovereignty movement, I have selected the final declaration of
the International Forum for Agroecology held in Mali in 2015. Indeed, on
February 27 of that year, civil society actors from all over the world gathered
in the Nyéléni Center to write the Declaration of the International Forum for
Agroecology. There, peasants, farmers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, fish-
erfolk, women’s movements, and urban people came together to create a
document that articulated their common vision, principles, and strategies of
what agroecology meant for them (Anderson, Pimbert, and Kiss 2015). The
Nyéléni Declaration (2015) claimed agroecology as a bottom-up movement
and practice that needs to be supported, rather than led, by science and
policy, linking in that way both agroecology and food sovereignty, and
bringing together the three approaches (science, movement and practice)
into one political paradigm (and discourse): food sovereignty.
For the FAO, I did not find any single text expressing an official view of
what agroecology is for this organization. In the FAO’s Agroecology web-
page, the institution merely uploads the reports, discussions, and presenta-
tions from the agroecology meetings the organization has been facilitating
since 2014. For this reason, I have selected directly texts from the
Agroecology website of FAO (http://www.fao.org/agroecology/en) referring
to agroecology definitions. Particularly, I selected the text of the “10 key
elements of agroecology” identified by FAO, derived from the general prin-
ciples articulated for agroecology, as well as the descriptions that FAO makes
of agroecology as a science, practices, and social process on the same website.
For national governments, I performed a search in the AgroecologyLex
database of laws promoting agroecology at the Nation-State level (http://
www.fao.org/agroecology/policies-legislations/en/). AgroecologyLex is a
FAO-created database in coordination with FAOLEX specialized on different
legal frameworks, policies, and programs concerning agroecology in different
countries. The database showed only two nation-state laws: one in Nicaragua
(Law No. 765-2011) and one in France (Law No. 2014-1170). Other laws at
lower levels (e.g., Misiones in Argentina; Brazilia, Brazil Federal District,
Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Rondonia in Brazil, and others) were also
shown, but I focused only on the Nation-State scale. In the case of France,
the government has been strongly pushing for agroecology since 2012 with a
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 675

strong media and lobbying machine to promote agroecology in the interna-

tional arena. For instance, the government launched the Agroecology Project
in 2012 as part of its commitment “to changing production models in order
to combine economic, social and environment high performance” (“The
Agroecology Project in France” 2012) and in October 2014 approved the
“Law for the future of agriculture, food and forest” (Law No. 2014-1170),
informally known as the law of agroecology. Thus, for France, I selected both
the text of the government’s website of the Agroecology Project and the
preface and objectives of the Law. At the European level, this is the first
attempt to upscale agroecology toward higher territorial levels, and consider-
ing its relevance, it seems important to understand what type of narrative is
behind such law and project when referring to agroecology.

Lexicometric analysis
Lexicometry is the measurement of the frequency of co-occurrence of words
in a text to produce word-count-based statistics. Selected texts from all four
actors were analyzed with the IRAMUTEQ software, an R-based interface
that provides statistical indicators and graphical representations that enable
the analysis of written texts (Ratinaud 2009). Iramuteq uses the ALCESTE
algorithm which divides the text into text segments and calculates the
frequency of word co-occurrences. Among the many features of the software,
I used cluster analysis to study the text as well as word clouds to visualize the
more frequent words in each of the narratives. For the cluster analysis, the
software divides the body of the text into segments, within which words are
counted. Iramuteq uses a dictionary to transform verbal tenses into the
infinitive form, plural into singular, and makes adjectives masculine in
order to count words with similar roots as the same word. It then performs
a hierarchical clustering of text segments according to the frequency of the
words within the selected segments. It calculates the significance of words
and profile variables associated with each cluster. The resulting clusters
group text segments containing specific words that are used together when
articulating a narrative. Reinert (1983) considers each cluster as a “world,” a
relatively stable cognitive-perceptual framework, characterizing social repre-
sentations. In this paper, the resulting clusters are considered the main
narratives about agroecology contained in the group of texts analyzed.

Results
The word cloud of all four texts put together in one document (Figure 1),
clearly shows that we are talking about agroecology. Unsurprisingly, the
most frequent words were agroecology (95 occurrence) and food (94)
followed by production (56) system (49). The words farmer, local,
676 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

Figure 1. Wordcloud of a merged text of different agroecological political actors.

development, social, agriculture/al, appear in the rank 30–39, while knowl-

edge, land, support, farm, policy, health, practice, product, policy, natural,
resource, territory, economic, process, or agroecological appear within the
rank 20–29. These words are all keywords when analyzing documents
regarding agroecology and are the type of words that can facilitate the
perception that homogenous discourses exist among agroecological actors.
It is however the cluster analysis which gives us the different narratives
about what different actors mean when they speak about agroecology based
on what words they give more emphasis to in their discourses. The cluster
analysis performed produced five narratives (Figure 2). Not surprisingly, the
different narratives are associated with the different actors analyzed, although
in some cases, there is overlapping of more than one actor into one narrative,
and one actor linked to more than one narrative, as I will show later. I named
the narratives using one or several of the first five words that characterize
each of them.
The French government appeared in two narratives (Table 1; Figure 2):
the first one (class 1), which I named the “Agricultural development”
narrative, results from the agroecology law of the French government.
This discourse is close to the cluster of class 5, which represents the
second narrative of the French government, linked to the text of the
Agroecology Project. I named this second narrative “Performance.” In
both narratives, the role of science is important: agroecology is about
innovation, science, and research. Health is also significantly important
in both cases and thus characterizes the French government narrative too.
We could state that for the French government, the ecological and techno-
productive dimension of agroecology is predominant. In the case of the
Agroecology Project, the words territorial, social, and farmer are also
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 677

Dendogram

Class 1 Class 5 Class 2 Class 4 Class 3

Narratives Agricultural Performance Natural resource, Ecosystem’s People’s &
development climate change & ecological women
food security management Solidarity
Text French Law French FAO FAO/Nicaragua Law Nyéléni
Agroecology Declaration
Project
development performance natural resource principle people
product combine climate change ecosystem community
agricultural environmental fair ecological woman
industrial economic ensure management common
plan high increase element solidarity
origin social food security crop control
regional transition land biological dialogue
measure production good animal decision
agriculture agroecological human design build
public level balance framework agroecology
research promotion tradition livestock diverse
guideline territorial forest interaction struggle
promote process secure farm relationship
health strategy maintenance organic popular
innovation dimension livelihood base right
sustainable science income apply pillar
account policy fishery develop youth
renewable protection recycle soil learn
support health governance synergy institution
process farmer access environment consumer
challenge productive role
diversity population fundamental
holistic dynamic
direct life
share
collective
world
organization
culture

Figure 2. Dendrogram and resulting narratives of the lexicometric cluster analysis of agroecol-
ogy-related policy texts with the associated list of words that significantly characterize each of
the narratives (words in the list are ordered according to their relative importance in the text of
each class as given by a Chi2 test).

Table 1. Narratives and agroecology dimensions linked to different political actors working to
promote agroecology.
Actor Narratives Agroecology dimensions
French government “Agricultural development” Ecological and techno-
“Performance” productive
Socio-economic and cultural
FAO “Natural resources, climate change & food Ecological and techno-
security” productive
“Ecosystem’s ecological management” Socioeconomic and cultural
Sociopolitical
Nicaragua government “Ecosystem’s ecological management” Ecological and techno-
productive
Food sovereignty “People’s & women solidarity” Socioeconomic and cultural
movement Sociopolitical
678 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

relevant and introduce the social-economical and cultural dimensions of

agroecology into the narrative. In both cases, the territorial scale trans-
cends the farm to the region (French law) and the territory (French
Agroecology Project). The French government’s broad narrative, com-
posed of these two sub-narratives, does not consider the sociopolitical
dimension of agroecology.
The FAO also shows two closely related narratives in the cluster analysis,
one which I named “Natural resources, climate change & food security”
(class 2) and the other on “Ecosystem’s ecological management” (class 4)
which is shared with the government of Nicaragua (Table 1). The first
narrative could be named CSA, since the works that significantly characterize
this narrative (e.g., climate change, food security, forest, tradition, livelihood,
income, recycle, diversity) are very much linked to this concept, first
launched by FAO in 2010 (FAO 2010). Interestingly, the narrative is also
defined by the words fair, access, governance, and land, introducing the
sociopolitical dimension of agroecology. In this narrative, the social-eco-
nomic and cultural dimension is characterized by the words livelihood,
income, and tradition. The Ecosystem’s ecological management that illus-
trates the other FAO narrative and the government of Nicaragua is char-
acterized by words like crop, animal, livestock, soil, organic, farm, and
population. Here, the focus is on the farm level and the ecological manage-
ment of the farm; that is, it is a narrative very close to the first definitions of
agroecology as the “science of applying ecological concepts and principles to
the design and management of sustainable agricultural systems.” This narra-
tive only works with the ecological and techno-productive dimension of
agroecology. In sum, the FAO as an institution has a strong focus on the
ecological and techno-productive dimension of agroecology, but it also con-
siders the other two dimensions if we take the two narratives together.
The government of Nicaragua, through its Law No. 765, has an
“Ecosystem’s ecological management narrative” (class 4), which is purely
ecological and techno-productive focused on the farm (Figure 2). This is
not surprising if we consider that the name of the law is “Law of promotion
of agroecological or organic production.” That is, the law treats agroecology
as organic production, thus, showing a narrow approximation to agroecology
which is reflected throughout the document, as mentioned above when
describing the words that significantly characterize this narrative (e.g., crop,
animal, livestock, soil, organic, farm, population).
The last discourse, which is separated from the other four in the dendo-
gram of the cluster analysis (Figure 2), is characteristic of the food sover-
eignty movement (class 3). This discourse, which I named “People’s &
women solidarity” is characterized by a strong focus on the processes and
the politics of agroecology. Words like dialogue, solidarity, relationship,
decision, right, or struggle significantly describe the narrative. Furthermore,
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 679

it is the only narrative where the words institution and organization are
relevant. It has a strong focus on the people, rather than on the agroecosys-
tem, and words like woman, youth, community, people, and popular are
important. It is the only narrative where a food system’s approach exists,
including consumers (again focus on people) in the discourse. Here, the
focus is on the world and the processes rather than on the farm. The socio-
political dimension of agroecology is predominant while the ecological and
techno-productive is absent. The social-economic and cultural dimension is
characterized in this discourse by words like culture, but also common or
collective, which suggests a focus not on capitalist economy but on other
types of economics (e.g., social and solidarity economy, feminist economics,
institutional economics, or economy of the commons).

Discussion
Based on political agroecology, and through the analysis of agroecology-
related policy texts from different political actors, I identify five agroecolo-
gical narratives in the policy/political arena, with different focus in terms of
scale (from the farm to the food system) and dimensions of agroecology
(ecological and techno-productive, socioeconomic, sociopolitical and cul-
tural). My results support Giraldo and Rosset (2017) suggestion of agroecol-
ogy being disputed, although we find a more complex scenario in which
there is more than a two-sided struggle.
Some narratives subsume agroecology into an ecological intensification
agenda by focusing mostly on the ecological and techno-productive dimen-
sion of agroecology, as is the case of the governments of France and
Nicaragua (Table 1). Agroecology is reduced to a set of practices that can
help to make agriculture more sustainable. This narrative understands
knowledge as scientific knowledge and does not consider traditional knowl-
edge a key element in agroecology (Toledo and Barrera-Basols, 2008). In this
way, this narrative introduces agroecology into a reformist political agenda
which does not aim to transform the system. There is a lack of focus on food
systems, which reduces also the impact of these agroecology laws and sup-
ports the fact that nation-state governments have a very narrow focus of the
meaning of agroecology. It is surprising, however, that a Latin American
government is linked to the Ecosystem’s ecological management narrative
since in Latin America, the political dimension of agroecology is well devel-
oped (Altieri, Nicholls, and Montalba 2017). Perhaps the focus on the nation-
state level has favored this finding, and regional policies, as those found in
Brazil and Argentina, may follow more holistic narratives. In Brazil indeed,
the struggles of rural social movements working at the grassroots level in
agroecology have facilitated their participation in the development of new
680 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

policies that should break with the modernization paradigm on the part of
state institutions (Petersen, Mussoi, and Soglio 2013).
In the case of FAO, I found an intermediate narrative, where the approach
to agroecology is more complete, integrating through different narratives
(“Natural resources, climate change & food security” and “Ecosystem’s ecolo-
gical management”) all three dimensions of agroecology. Interestingly, FAO’s
approach to agroecology includes a political focus which is missing in the
government texts I have analyzed (Table 1). For instance, by recognizing the
importance of tradition in the narrative, FAO supports the role of local and
traditional knowledge. It also brings into the policy debate the issue of a fair
system and access to land, all key elements in a transition toward sustainable
food systems addressing the key points of unsustainability, which include not
only technical issues but also political ones. Still, FAO’s texts show a reformist
rather than a transformative agenda. This is also shown in the dendogram of
the cluster analysis with the FAO-associated narratives being a “sister group”
of governmental narratives and excluded from social movements’ narrative. As
an intermediate narrative, FAO could play an important role in transition
pathways. However, as in any transition, if there is not a clear final objective of
transformation, the transition can fail in supporting the creation of new
systems that really question the unsustainable basis of industrial conventional
agriculture. This reinforces the suggestion that actors whose narrative defends
transformation of food systems need to take part in relevant debates at
different levels, among other things to make clear the final objective(s) of
any agroecological transition (Giraldo and Rosset 2017; Holt-Giménez and
Altieri 2013).
The last narrative of agroecology, inserted within the food sovereignty policy
proposal, shows a transformative focus where the farm is not the level of action,
but rather the whole system. The text analyzed is a reaction to the perceived co-
optation process of agroecology by governmental and intergovernmental actors
(Giraldo and Rosset 2017). This narrative is characterized by a clear focus on the
people, rather than on the farm. It evokes the development of new systems based
on solidarity where people are at the heart of it. However, it is surprising that in
the discourse, agroecological practices are not significantly part of its definition.
Agroecology is composed of three dimensions, all of them equally important.
Most of these practices have their origins in local and traditional knowledge and
are essential for developing technologies that favor the autonomy of commu-
nities (Toledo and Barrera-Bassols 2008). Claiming local and traditional knowl-
edge as an inherent part of agroecological practices should also be a political goal
in a mental model and subsequent narrative aiming to confront capitalist
discourses and to transform the system.
It is not until 2015 that the global food sovereignty movement officially
reclaimed agroecology as an intrinsic part of the food sovereignty proposal.
As a result, there has been a lack of policy proposals linked to agroecology
 AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 681

coming from the social movements at the international level (Gonzalez De

Molina 2013). This could have facilitated the entrance of official actors in
developing a set of policies responding to what agroecology is for them. But I
suggest this is not in fact a de-politization of agroecology, but rather a
resignification of the politics of agroecology in which all three (inseparable)
components of policy making in agriculture: practices, management, and
science, respond to a mental model that introduces agroecology into the
new green capitalism discourses, narrowly framing sustainability and claim-
ing this for the common good. Thus, contrary to Levidow (2015), I suggest
this is not the sustainable intensification path, but rather that agroecology has
been coopted by political actors to promote sustainable intensification,
resignifying to their convenience what is agroecology.

Conclusions
In this article, I state that there does not exist such a thing as agroecology as a
science, as a practice, or as a movement as stated by Wezel et al. (2009).
Agriculture is always composed by three intertwined elements (assessment,
management, and practices) that cannot be separated one from the others, and
the different forms in which these elements can be organized reflect different
mental models and associated narratives (Rivera-Ferre 2012; Rivera-Ferre,
Ortega-Cerdà, and Baumgärtner 2013). That is, By suggesting that different
discourses exist in agroecology in each of the different approaches, I state that
in fact what exists are different narratives around agroecology, all composed of
the inseparable elements of assessment (science), practices, and management
(politics: movement, policies). However, the fragmentation of agroecology into
these three elements as if they were separated from each other not only
facilitates this cooptation process, but also makes it difficult to identify which
mental models coexist within the same concept: agroecology.
I also suggest that rather than a de-politization, we are witnessing a
process of re-signification of Agroecology in different ways; so, it can accom-
modate different narratives and thus, different mental models, some of which
follow a green capitalism agenda. As suggested by Giraldo and Rosset (2017),
we may be witnessing “the beginning of a new stage whereby the Green
Revolution is molting, to take on a new, ever more ‘green’ disguise, to
legitimize itself through an agroecological discourse based on social inclu-
sion, healthy foods and safeguarding Mother Earth.” I also show that social
movements have a narrative clearly differentiated from the others, while FAO
has an intermediate one closer to governmental narratives. This suggests that
FAO can play an important role in a process of agroecological transition at
the global level, but strong and strategic alliances may be needed to support
transformational narratives among actors supporting an Agroecology capable
to confront and transform the system.
682 M. G. RIVERA-FERRE

Funding
This work was financially supported by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (RYC-
2012-09988).

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