Aim:
There is a growing interest in agricultural systems that serve multiple purposes, in the context of driving factors such as climate change, liberalization, environmental concerns, and changing agricultural institutions. Farming systems face a continuous pressure to innovate. The drivers also strongly affect agricultural and environmental policies, as these must support the sustainability of agricultural systems and their contribution to sustainable development in general. This defines a demand on research approaches that enable analysis of current farming systems, exploration and design of alternative ones as well as co-learning and dissemination strategies. These research approaches must provide capabilities for assessing the economic, environmental and social aspects of farming system’s evolution in different spatial and temporal contexts. Today, a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods exist, but there is a lack of integration in evaluating issues which range from strictly technical to social, and to landscape related attributes.

The goals of the symposium are to:

• Provide an opportunity to integrate knowledge across disciplines targeted at farming system analysis, design and innovation
• Compare approaches being used/developed in different research groups
• Identify the available operational tools and the future research needs

The symposium has a methodological focus, and aims at both quantitative and qualitative approaches, but with a clear scope for integration across the biophysical and social domains. The symposium aims at covering a broad range of contexts, both from the developed and developing world.