Application of a territorial soft system approach for conceptual modeling of an agroecosystem.

In the province of Québec in Canada, in accordance with the Land Use Planning and Development Act of 1987, every regional county municipality must maintain in force, at all times, an RCM plan applicable to its whole territory. An RCM plan must, regarding the territory of a regional county municipality, determine the general aims of land development policy for the region and identify the public policies on land use of the territory for the different parts of it. Along with the baseline information and the interlinking of the environmental components of the territory, one of the most significant operations involved in planning is the identification of best scenarios or options that involve, very early in the process, conceptualization and formalization of the system under study. However, in accordance with the systemic nature of this problem, several methodological questions have to be addressed before entering the procedure. Among these, how does one gather intelligence on a complex geographical system in an integrated and systematic approach? How can we formalize environmental, social and political interactions and feedback running within these complex systems? How can we point out the fundamental challenges of these interactions? For the specialist in regional planning, these questions can be difficult to manage in an operational context, mainly because of efficiency reasons. The main objectives of this contribution are to show the relevance of an adapted soft system methodology to gather intelligence on the overall functioning and structure of a geographical system at the subregional level scale. The case study is part of a wider academic research project. Thus, the participative process, very particular to Checkland's SSM, has been partially simulated for the purpose of our demonstration, as we postulated that the stakeholders shared the same views about the problem. In that, we saw the SSM as an adaptable methodology, and with the problems experienced individually by regional planners, we add some of our ideas to the method as we adapted it to this particular context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]