This document presents the work of the exchange workshop organized on December 14 and 15 2017 by the Working Group on Agroecological Transitions (GTAE in french – created by the french NGOs AVSF, Agrisud, CARI and Gret) and dedicated to methods to evaluate the performance of agroecology and development conditions.
The work of these two days highlighted the multiplicity of existing methods, but with the possibility of constructing a common standard for measuring the performance of agroecological systems. This involves analyzing the effects of practices and systems on different complementary scales of plot / farm / territory, using specific criteria and indicators for agri-environmental and socio-economic aspects. Thanks to the confrontation of different methods presented, interests, limits and conditions of their implementation, the workshop resulted in the proposal by the GTAE of a first evaluation grids with the indicators and potentially mobilizable tools for the measurement of socio-economic and agro-environmental effects of agro-ecological practices and systems.
This common base, whose content remains to be refined, should enable development practitioners to better evaluate their actions and to compare situations from different territories with the challenge of both convincing policy makers of the relevance and the effectiveness of agroecological transitions on objective elements, but also to guide farmers advice and their support process in this transition.