Editorial Introduction to Volume II 5agriculture, involving the domestication of wild cereals to increase stability but not
necessarily, at first, to increase productivity; manorial agriculture of the British
Middle Ages; modern western agriculture; and the green revolution in Indonesia.
The paper ends by suggesting the need for practical analytical tools and develop-
ment packages that emphasise multidisciplinary approaches, such as agroecosys-
tem analysis.
The second article by Carl Folke and colleagues analyses the characteristics of
social-ecological systems. They seek to provide a rich understanding of not just
human–environment interactions but of how the world we live in actually works
and the implications it has for current policies and governance. The chapter
emphasizes that the social landscape should be approached as carefully as the eco-
logical in order to clarify features that contribute to the resilience of social-ecolog-
ical systems. These include vision, leadership and trust; enabling legislation that
creates social space for ecosystem management; funds for responding to environ-
mental change and for remedial action; capacity for monitoring and responding to
environmental feedback; information flow through social networks; the combina-
tion of various sources of information and knowledge; sense-making and arenas of
collaborative learning for ecosystem management. Their work illustrates that the
interplay between individuals (e.g. leadership, teams, actor groups), the emergence
of nested organizational structures, institutional dynamics, and power relations
tied together in dynamic social networks are examples of features that seem critical
in adaptive governance that allows for ecosystem management and for responding
to environmental feedback across scales. They conclude that the existence of trans-
formative capacity is essential in order to create social-ecological systems with the
capability to manage ecosystems sustainably for human well-being. Adaptive
capacity will be needed to strengthen and sustain such systems in the face of exter-
nal drivers and events.
The third article by Stephen Gliessman is an overview of agroecological
approaches to the management of agricultural systems. As he indicates, ‘discus-
sions about sustainable agriculture must go beyond what happens within the fences
of any individual farm’. It is the wider environmental, economic and social interac-
tions that are critical. A practising farmer as well distinguished academic, Gliess-
man draws on a wide range of experience to set out an agroecological perspective
to the flows of energy and nutrients in agroecosystems, and identifies the popula-
tion regulating mechanisms and potential for developing dynamic equilibira. The
paper includes a table that summarizes the guiding principles for a process of
design of and conversion to sustainable agricultural systems. Comparisons are
made between traditional, conventional (or modern) and sustainable systems. This
question of redesign is critical if different patterns of agricultural and environmen-
tal management are to emerge, patterns that are able to produce both food and
important environmental services.
In the fourth article, Kevin Gallagher and co-authors describe the ecological
and social basis for IPM in rice agroecosystems in Asia. The chapter, drawn from
the book The Pesticide Detox, first sets out the specific ecological basis of rice fields,