Des lois agronomiques à l’enquête agroécologique. Esquisse d’une épistémologie de la variation dans les agroécosystèmes

Abstract

This paper examines the epistemological differences between the theoretical frameworks of conventional agronomy and agroecology. The analysis focuses more specifically on their methods for administrating living’s variations, meaning ecological, evolutionary and behavioural dynamics. Through a synthesis of the historical conditions of the emergence in France, of agronomic sciences, we attempt to isolate more precisely the postulates and protocols which have led to the institutionalization of conventional agronomy as the dominant model. We also try to emphasize how this historical structuration of agronomic sciences in a nomological-prescriptive paradigm is a condition of possibility for an objective alliance between agronomy and industry. As an alternative to the dominant model, this paper hypothesizes that a specific form of ecological inquiry, historical and situated, which structures the various agroecologies, and particularly permaculture, could be a better way to inform renewed agricultural practices, answering both political and scientific erosion of the dominant agronomic model, and the systemic ecological crisis it is partly responsible for.

Keywords

• epistemology of agronomy
• history of agricultural modernization
• agroecology
• theory of inquiry
• eco-evolutionnary dynamics