Geographies of Multifunctional Agriculture: Developing Governance Explanations

This article charts some of the major recent contributions to the growing social sciences literature on multifunctional agriculture (MFA). It identifies three main geographies of MFA. The first is a broadly sociostructural view as policy discourses that communicate and coordinate new political imperatives in agriculture – increasingly global in reach. The second is as an empirical characteristic of land use management and local actor‐based decision‐making – embedded within but extending outwards from territories and rural communities. The third and most recent is as a theoretical perspective that conceptualises agricultural/rural structural transitions. Coherent in their own right, each of these geographies however remains relatively autonomous. The article contends that one means of synthesising these geographies is to build upon current widespread use of governance concepts. Developing governance explanations in line with contemporary theorising in the social sciences would offer MFA research novel insights and valuable new analytical foci. I conclude that using governance explanations in this way would not only open out social science debates, but would also offer the prospect of creating new interdisciplinary conversations with burgeoning natural science research on multifunctionality.