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Peer-reviewedCC BY-NC-NDAgroforestry systems

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

  • Meine van Noordwijk1,2,3
  • Tobias Plieninger4,5
  • Javed Rizvi6,7
  • Chinwe Ifejika Speranza8
  • Christian Dupraz9
9 affiliations
  1. 1Landscape Alliance (CIFOR-ICRAF), Bogor, Indonesia.
  2. 2Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
  3. 3Brawijaya University, Malang, Indonesia.
  4. 4Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
  5. 5Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany.
  6. 6Landscape Alliance (CIFOR-ICRAF), Toronto, Canada.
  7. 7International Union of Agroforestry, Prague, Czech Republic.
  8. 8Institute of Geography, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland.
  9. 9INRAE, University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France.
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Abstract

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.

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Cite

BibTeXRIS
BibTeX
@article{noordwijk2026agroforestry,
  title = {{Agroforestry ambitions fifty years after launch of a governance-people-science boundary concept.}},
  author = {Meine van Noordwijk and Tobias Plieninger and Javed Rizvi and Chinwe Ifejika Speranza and Christian Dupraz},
  journal = {Agroforestry systems},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  doi = {10.1007/s10457-026-01720-3},
  url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42996422},
  note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY  - JOUR
TI  - Agroforestry ambitions fifty years after launch of a governance-people-science boundary concept.
AU  - Meine van Noordwijk
AU  - Tobias Plieninger
AU  - Javed Rizvi
AU  - Chinwe Ifejika Speranza
AU  - Christian Dupraz
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/05
JO  - Agroforestry systems
DO  - 10.1007/s10457-026-01720-3
UR  - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42996422
AB  - 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.
SN  - 0167-4366
SN  - 1572-9680
ER  -