Nathalie Girard

The active role of instruments in articulating knowing and knowledge: the case of animal qualification practices in breeding organisations

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing-in-practice an knowledge, in learning processes. The paper focuses on a particuar activity: qualification of ewes in the breeding sector. It is based on observation and practice-based studies. The study of instruments used in daily practices allows us to go beyond the dichotomy between opposite types of knowledge, i.e. scientific knowledge seen as a stock and sensible knowledge seen as purely tacit and equated to non-instrumental practices. The paper complements more classical practice-based approaches by proposing a new perspective of instruments in learning processes, which is to particular relevance where power is diffuse.

Analyzing indicators for combining natural resources management and production-oriented activities

It is recognized today that production systems can be used for natural resources management, whereas it is difficult to implement management that integrates production and natural resources conservation. This difficulty can be explained by the complexity of interactions between production systems and biodiversity dynamics and by the lack of predictability of the impacts of techniques on ecosystems. Designing tools to effectively guide such integration in this uncertain context is therefore a top priority. In this perspective, the aim of this paper is to analyze the indicators used by managers when trying to integrate ecological systems and production-oriented activities and, consequently, to assess their relevance when faced with these new challenges. Our analysis distinguishes indicators-in-theory and indicators-in-use. We studied the first ones with an original analytic grid to decipher their cognitive and management orientation through documents and interviews with indicator designers. We studied indicators-in-use through interviews and ethnographic observations of indicator users in four situations (forestry, pastoral, wildlife and breed management) in southwestern France. Our findings reveal the distance between managed objects and measured objects, thus explaining their effectiveness in terms of management. We also show how the indicators strongly shape practices and how they are adapted by users to their situation, emphasizing the role of experiential knowledge to create situated indicators. Finally, we discuss our results regarding tool design for environmental management.

Analyzing Theory and Use of Management Tools for Sustainable Agri-environmental Livestock Practices: The Case of the Pastoral Value in the French Pyrenees Mountains

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the design of management tools for sustainable agricultural systems that are able to accompany farming practices in anticipating the long-term effects of practices on natural resources management. Its originality is to analyze tools on the basis of their cognitive content as well as their management philosophy and their organizational model. We applied this approach to the main tool (Pastoral Value) used to assess the potential of forage resources in France. Our findings show how the tool strongly shapes practices and how it is adapted by technicians to their situation within the context of the French Central Pyrenees, emphasizing the role of experiential knowledge.

Practicing Agroecology: Management Principles Drawn From Small Farming in Misiones (Argentina)

In face of sustainability challenges, agronomical research has focused on the design of new production systems, whereas ethnographic studies have put forward the traditional small production systems. A gap remains between such agroecological design and the practices of farms. Our objectives are to draw principles for agroecological management from the in-depth study of practices in ecologically based farms in Argentina. We extracted three principles: 1) adjustment and observation instead of control, 2) variable and flexible management in time and space, and 3) permanent at-home experimentation. After examining their generality, we discuss the paths to take these systems as models for the ecologization of conventional systems.

Agroecology as farmers’ situated ways of acting : a conceptual framework

ABSTRACT The limits of numerous agricultural systems developed on principles set after the Second World War are increasingly identified and highlighted. Meanwhile, agricultural and food systems associated with agroecological principles are progressively institutionalized in various countries. Whereas a dominant research production by agronomists consists in deduction of “agroecological practices” from fundamental agroecological principles, a gap remains between those principles and the specific management actions on farms that allow to build new agroecological framing systems. In this study, we stem from an analysis of management actions in eight different case studies corresponding to farmers’ collectives engaged in an evolution of their practices towards agroecology. We review the agroecological scientific literature to identify shared principles and system properties deduced from them, that we iteratively compared to the practices implemented by farmers, making the transition in our case studies. Our proposal is then to describe agroecology “in the making” as 4 interconnected ways of acting, each corresponding to specific relations between management actions and the systems’ properties. Lastly, the analysis of agroecology from the actors’ management practices allows us to support a new viewpoint about a research agenda for agronomists, giving reflexive benchmarks to relocate research activities within the institutionalization dynamics of agroecology.