What Skills Do Agricultural Professionals Need in the Transition towards a Sustainable Agriculture? A Qualitative Literature Review

Abstract

Agriculture is facing mounting challenges across the globe and must move towards more sustainable practices to combat climate change and meet changed production requirements. Education has been acknowledged as highly important in a sustainable transition, but there is no clear agreement about what skills are needed for professionals in the agricultural system. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyse skills needed for professionals in the agricultural system to engage in the transition towards sustainable agriculture and elaborate on the implications of this for a transition towards sustainable agriculture. The review is based on a qualitative semi-systematic literature review of 20 peer-reviewed articles concerned with sustainability, skills, and agriculture. Five categories of skills were identified and analysed, including systems perspective, lifelong learning, knowledge integration, building and maintaining networks and learning communities, and technical and subject-specific knowledge and technology. As the identified categories of skills have emerged from different contextual settings and a diverse group of actors, these five categories encourage a broad and inclusive understanding of skills that can be translated into different contextual settings, scales, and professions within the agricultural system. The article concludes that professionals engaged in the transition towards sustainable agriculture need skills that encourage a perspective that moves beyond generic discipline-based skills and instead builds on heterogeneity, inclusion, and use of different actors' knowledge, practices, and experiences, and the ability to respond and be proactive in a constantly changing world.

Keywords

sustainability; agricultural professionals; sustainable agricultural systems; sustainable education; skills

Published in

Sustainability
2021, volume: 13, number: 24, article number: 13556
Publisher: MDPI

SLU Authors

• Blix Germundsson, Lisa

  • Department of People and Society, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Associated SLU-program

SLUsystematic

Global goals (SDG)

SDG2 Zero hunger
SDG4 Quality education
SDG12 Responsible consumption and production

UKÄ Subject classification

Agricultural Science
Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use

Publication identifier

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su132413556

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/115492