Preparing the Ground: Social Research for the Facilitation of Sustainable Agriculture

‘Facilitating sustainable agriculture’ is an agricultural extension paradigm based on farming systems practice and the actor-oriented perspective on rural development. The challenge for agricultural extension is to facilitate a convergence of conflicting interests within a forum governed by the principle of communicative rationality. An initial stakeholder analysis is advised as a first step to secure the basis of facilitation. The recommended analysis would identify the diversity of interests pertinent to the issue of sustainability and the actors required for a successful forum. However, there is an absence of any coherent guidelines for conducting such an analysis. This paper then, presents guidelines to conduct an appropriate preparatory analysis to inform the facilitation of sustainable agriculture. An ethnographic approach is advocated for two reasons. Firstly, it is relevant to the systems view of sustainability as it grasps the diversity of values, priorities, goals and interests that give meaning to the issue of sustainability in a given agricultural landscape. Secondly, the approach is fully informed by the actor-oriented perspective on rural development. Thus the preparatory analysis presented in this paper is consistent with both theoretical influences shaping the extension paradigm to facilitate sustainable agriculture.