Assessing the Performance of Sustainable Intensification Strategies to Achieve Multiple Development Goals.

Sustainable intensification has become an organizing concept for investing development resources to improve the productivity of agricultural systems while also meeting social, economic, and environmental goals. The use of the term, however, has outpaced consensus-driven efforts to more clearly define and measure outcomes. As a result, scientists frequently apply the term to the outcomes of a wide range of agricultural technologies or innovations that may achieve only increases in productivity or profitability, with little or no reference to impacts on other sustainability domains. Critics of the concept rightfully point out that the term is often applied inconsistently and to systems that fall far short of being sustainable. In an effort to advance the thinking around sustainable intensification and to more rigorously measure the impact of development investments, particularly in agricultural research, an international group of agronomists, economists, ecologists, and social scientists convened several workshops and developed a Sustainable Intensification Assessment Framework (SIAF). The SIAF is not intended to measure an ultimate state of sustainability of any farming system nor is it intended to replace existing, more detailed sustainability assessment tools. Rather, the goal is to provide a framework for assessing the performance of agricultural strategies to improve productivity, economic, social, human, and environmental outcomes on a relative basis and at multiple spatial scales. A working group has ‘field tested’ the framework using data from a range of agricultural research and development projects supported by a range of development donors. I will discuss the development of the framework and its strengths and weaknesses using some research results from USAID-funded projects in sub-Saharan Africa.