Multidimensional and multiscale assessment of the agroecological transition of a village in Eastern Senegal

Agroecology is seen as the most promising approach to overcome the daunting economic, environmental and social challenges that agriculture is currently facing. Yet, there is a lack of systemic, multiscale and multidimensional assessments of agroecological transitions (GTAE, 2018; Wiget et al., 2020). Research is also needed to gather evidence from and communicate about stories of success and failures to draw lessons on how to accelerate these transitions (Dendoncker et al. 2018). Assessing agroecological transitions presents many methodological challenges related to their complexity. The aim of this study was to develop and apply an innovative multiscale and multidimensional assessment method that overcomes the methodological challenges of the assessment of agroecological transitions. This innovative method builds on a systematic review of existing assessment methods, through which we identified 14 methods. Using the characteristics of these 14 methods, our method articulates different steps, encompassing various scales: 1) a contextualisation step depicting the socio-economic and environmental context and analysing the level of agroecological transition and its development conditions, 2) a multicriteria assessment of the multidimensional impacts at the field, individual, household, farm and landscape levels, and 3) a multistakeholder multicriteria assessment of the impacts at the territory scale. A total of 61 indicators were calculated for the multicriteria assessment: 53 at the field, farm and landscape levels that enabled to reveal technical performance, social aspects and environmental impacts and resilience, and 8 at the individual level that allowed to assess individual well-being. We applied the method in a case study in Eastern Senegal, in the village of Sare Boubou, located in the Tambacounda region. Supported by a Senegalese NGO, the village is going through an agroecological transition with the aim of improving households' self-sufficiency. The applicati