A New Practice: Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture 317Soft systems are deliberate social constructs, that is, they exist only to the extent
that people agree on their goals, their boundaries, their membership and their
usefulness. The crucial assumption is that system goals are not given but contested
and that system boundaries are negotiated. The necessary condition for a soft sys-
tem to exist is agreement among its members on its goals. A soft system may also
be defined as a human activity system, e.g. an organization, a task force or the
stakeholders in an agroecosystem who have been forced by environmental prob-
lems to exert joint agency at the level of social aggregation commensurate with the
agroecosystem. Thus the agroecosystem is a subsystem of a human activity system,
and its sustainability is an emergent property of that soft system. In this perspec-
tive, hard systems are subsumed by soft systems, just as scientific research is a
special approach to the social construction of reality.
A special application of soft systems thinking is represented in what are called
agricultural knowledge and information systems (AKIS) (Röling, 1988, Röling,
1990; Röling and Engel, 1991; Engel, 1995). AKIS can be used in a number of
ways:
- empirically to discover how social actors in agriculture, such as scientists, advis-
ers, farmers, but also seed suppliers, credit banks and so on, are linked together
in the creation, adaptation, sharing, storage and application of knowledge and
information; - normatively, as a mental construct, to design ideal links and flows;
- analytically to guide interventions to ensure that the actors do, in practice,
interact in ways that give rise to desired emergent properties, such as innova-
tion. System boundaries can be drawn widely, to achieve goals such as a com-
petitive and productive and/or indeed a sustainable agriculture, or narrowly to
achieve goals such as the production of x-litres of milk per cow.
Peter Checkland’s real achievement is the development of a soft systems methodol-
ogy (SSM), which allows a group of actors who are faced with a shared problem to
engage in a collective learning process in order to design a human activity system
that can help solve the problem through collective action. SSM has been tested
extensively over a period of more than 15 years, but especially in corporate envi-
ronments. At a workshop with Checkland and some of the present contributors, it
was noted that sustainability problems are more complex than corporate ones with
respect to the social dilemmas which arise between individual and collective inter-
ests (Ostrom, 1990, 1991, 1992; Koelen and Röling, 1994; Maarleveld, 1996)
and hence require more preliminary exploration (Leeuwis, 1993).