| Chapter : | Introduction: Putting Ecological Economics into Sustainable Agricultural Practices |
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for a conceptual shift which recognises that economic, ecological, and social issues are inextricably linked and must be considered together. As the Brundtland Report pointed out,
Current policy processes are advertised under the banner of sustainability, but without actually carrying the underlying principles of integration and holism through to the implementation phase. This situation therefore calls for an alternative approach that fully identifies and explicitly explores the dynamic relationships among the components of the agricultural system under investigation, with particular attention on how to improve the policy-making processes in relation to agricultural sustainability. Emerging policy problems related to ecological agriculture are not considered anew, but in the context of existing institutions. Thus, the interdependencies and interactions between agricultural development and its biophysical, economic, political, and sociocultural environments need to be explicitly examined. A major theme of this book is how to develop and apply a holistic approach to this agricultural, social, economic, and environmental research. In considering this, two distinct but closely related research problems are identified.
Problem 1: There is a lack of appropriate analytical frameworks on sustainability
Despite the efforts of theorists and practitioners from economics, ecology, sociology, and other fields, there is still no general agreement about how to achieve the effective integration of the ecological, economic, and social aspects of sustainability. In the absence of a proven track record