The Work System: A Scale to Capture the Systemic Design Activity of Farmers in Agroecological Transition

This paper aims to provide some support for the widespread claim that agroecological transition entails a wide variety of changes for the farmers. It focuses on farmers’ work systems (combining several subsystems: biological and technical, socio-economic, family, and related to the farmers’ characteristics) and shows how agroecological transition deals with every part of these work systems. One case study is used to illustrate how farmers’ concerns, which are drivers of change, are constructed at the interface of these subsystems. The paper focuses on the Chronicle of Change method (Chizallet et al. 2020) to dissect the work subsystems to which the farmer refers in relation to this concern and to analyze how farmers make their work system evolve in the course of their agroecological transition. The perspective of this research paper is to offer tools and methods to support the agroecological transition of farmers in a systemic approach. It is thus shedding light on the transition from a work point of view and not only from a technical point of view.