Framing just agroecological transitions through participatory multistakeholder processes

Abstract

Agroecology, as conceptualised in the thirteen HLPE principles, embeds justice dimensions in the place-based sustainable transition pathways it supports, yet operationalising just agroecological transitions is understudied and remains a design and implementation challenge. In this paper, we apply Schlosberg's four-dimensional justice framework post-hoc, distinguishing distributive, procedural, recognition, and capabilities justice, to six country-level Vision to Action participatory visioning processes conducted under the CGIAR Agroecology Initiative in India, Kenya, Peru, Senegal, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe. Although these processes had not been designed with explicit justice objectives, justice-relevant content emerged across them: competing visions revealed whose values are at stake in the transition; the composition and design of sessions determined whose knowledge shaped transition pathways; and intra-transition trade-offs revealed who bears the costs of change. The analysis revealed shared concerns around food security, fair returns, gender equity, and reduced external input dependence, which took locally specific forms. Capabilities concerns shaped transition pathways more than distributive and recognition claims; and a recurrent tension between visions of input autonomy and pathways of input substitution emerged. Government and private-sector actors were less represented than farmers but were generally assigned significant responsibility for enabling the transition. We argue that participatory multi-stakeholder visioning creates the conditions under which the justice content of agroecological transitions becomes visible, negotiable, and translatable into action planning. Establishing an explicit justice framing ex ante would allow deliberate choices on participant disaggregation while systematic mapping and engagement strategies for absent actors would allow future processes to embed justice-relevant content explicitly from the design stage.