Agroforestry ambitions fifty years after launch of a governance-people-science boundary concept

A novel word connecting agriculture and forestry, agroforestry, originated in 1976 with ambitions for radically better land use. At its 50’th anniversary, we reflect on its use in boundary work interfacing governance, people and science. Agroforestry as applied science started with describing the worlds’ farmed lands with trees’ in their eco-geographical and socio-historical context as plot/farm-level agroforestry (‘AF1’). In the 1990’s, attention shifted to the landscape scale AF2 and to a policy scale AF3. Simultaneously, climate-tree-soil-crop interactions, bio-economic, and social-ecological systems were further analysed. Searching in the Google Scholar database for ‘agroforestry’ we selected a 1007 well-cited publications (1979–2025) corpus with a total of 175,081 citations. These publications included AF1 (64%), AF2 (19%) and AF3(17%) as system scales. Research topics on Knowledge, Telecoupling, (local) Environment, Markets, Identity, and Rights accounted for 28, 25, 20, 10, 10, and 7%, of citations, respectively. The ambitions of ‘Productive AF’, ‘Multifunctional farms’ and ‘Landscape integration’ were linked to 28, 29% and 29% of citations, respectively; the ambitions on ‘Socio-cultural values’ and ‘Societal transformation’ only to 8% and 5%, respectively. Beyond the low-hanging fruit of existing AF farms, a ladder to reach more ambitious goals may inspire renewed forms of AF-boundary work.