Socioeconomic and political-cultural criteria for Agroecology: learnings from Participatory Guarantee Systems

A central debate of Agroecology is the incorporation of socioeconomic and political-cultural criteria in the evaluation of agri-food sustainability. However, the way to define and evaluate these criteria remains an unexplored terrain. In this paper, we aim to systematise how these dimensions are being defined and evaluated through the analysis of 8 initiatives of Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) considered to be part of the agroecological movement in Spain. This analysis identifies those criteria that are commonplace, widely recognised and evaluated by the PGS sample. An in-depth, qualitative analysis of the difficulties that PGS are encountering in defining and evaluating these criteria provides an insight into the complexity of the task. The analysis reveals the hurdles to overcome to better define Agroecology at a supralocal level in order to promote its scaling up and out.