COMPARISON OF AGROECOSYSTEM ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORKS

Abstract

The formulation of the concept of sustainability indicates the need to consider in a integral and global way the productive processes, as well as, the obtaining of sustainability measures. In this way lists of indicators and characteristics that they should have were made. Concepts, criteria and methodologies were then proposed to select / derive / build indicators that define the sustainability indexes or that were part of different sustainability evaluation frameworks. In Latin America, systems have been developed to evaluate agroecosystems with an unequal degree of conceptualization and rigor, and also with different criteria. Since these systems have been fairly analyzed in their conceptual phase as well as in their applied phase, in this article we propose to compare the "Framework for the evaluation of natural resource management systems incorporating sustainability indicators" (MESMIS) and the framework "Evaluation of agroecosystems through sustainability indicators", looking for similarities and differences between them, in order to highlight their advantages and limitations. As a general conclusion it is stated that none of the two frameworks presents in general, overcoming characteristics. However, the systemic approach present in the MESMIS framework gives it greater heuristic power.