Hrabrin Bashev
Why and How to Evaluate the "New" Governance Sustainability of Agriculture
Summary:
In Bulgaria, like in many other countries, there is practicaly no studies on the governance sustainability of agriculture and its importance for overall agricultural development. This study tries to fill the gap and suggesrs a holistic framework for understanding and assessing the governance sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture. The new approach is “tested” in a large-scale study to assess the governance sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture at national, sectoral, regional, ecosystem and farm levels.
It is proved that it is important to include the "missing" Governance Pillar in the assessment of the integral sustainability of agriculture and the sustainability of agricultural systems of different types. The multi-principal, multi-criteria and multi-indicator assessment of the governance sustainability of Bulgarian agriculture found out that the overall sustainability is at a “good” but close to the “satisfactory” level. In addition, there is a significant differentiation of the levels of integral governance sustainability of the different types of agro-systems in the country. Moreover, the individual indicators with the highest and lowest sustainability values determine the “critical” factors enhancing and deteriorating the particular and integral governance sustainability of the evaluated agro-system.
Given the importance of holistic assessments of this type for improving agricultural sustainability in general, and the governance sustainability of agriculture in particular, they should be expanded and their accuracy and representativeness improved. The later requires increasing precision by increasing the surveyed farms and stakeholders, and using more "objective" data from surveys, statistics, professional experts in the field, etc.
