Agroecology and the social sciences: A half-century systematic review

Publications in agroecology have been growing rapidly in recent decades. With roots in the biophysical sciences, social sciences, and peasant movements, agroecology is a transdisciplinary field bringing together different ways of knowing. Agroecological research has two main foci: a biophysical focus which operationalizes agroecology as the ecological study of agricultural production systems, and a socio-ecological focus that emphasizes agriculture as a coupled socio-ecological system, the importance of food systems and food security at the household and community level, and a normative dimension, focusing on social (in)justice and power inequalities. We examine the relationship between agroecology and the social sciences, asking specifically: 1) How are the engagements between agroecology and the social sciences changing over time, and how does this relationship compare to publishing trends in the biophysical and social sciences generally? 2) What is the engagement of agroecology over time with specific social science disciplines and fields — anthropology, economics, education, feminist studies, geography, political ecology/economy, sociology — and the recent social science topics of food justice and food sovereignty? 3) How do the topics and geographical focus of agroecology engaged with social science (AESS) differ from those of agroecology not engaged with social science (ANESS)? And, 4) in which journals are AESS and ANESS published? We quantitatively examine 7399 unique publications — gathered from five publication databases into our Agroecology Discipline Corpus 1960–2019 — to answer these questions. Our analyses show 1) the proportion of AESS is increasing over time, and that agroecology publications are growing at about double the rate of scientific literature overall; 2) increased engagement between agroecology and almost all social science disciplines and fields examined; 3) substantial topical differences between ANESS and AESS exist, reflecting ontological foci, as well as strong geographical differences in the proportion of AESS and ANESS; and 4) publication venues are not widely shared between AESS and ANESS, and a wide array of additional journals have become important venues for agroecological research from 2007 to 2019. We conclude by posing further questions about agroecology and the social sciences to be asked of the corpus we have assembled and classified. This review shows that agroecology's engagement with the social sciences has expanded greatly in recent decades, suggesting its further development as a transdisciplinary science and signaling its increasing relevance for large-scale agrifood systems change.