Boundaries and interdisciplinarity: the rise and fall of agroecosystem analysis in Southeast Asia

Abstract

In the past decade, agroecology has been promoted as a potential way to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration and overcome the uneven socio-ecological impacts of agricultural development, yet agroecologists also warn the danger of co-option by dominant agri-food systems. This paper seeks to understand the history of such tension through the development of agroecosystem analysis—a research method related to but different from contemporary agroecology—in Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, between 1970 and 1990. The paper adopts the concepts of boundary work and boundary object to scrutinize how agroecosystem analysis was theorized: on the one hand, scientists’ emphasis on the interdisciplinary of agroecosystem analysis could be read as a boundary work differing the method from the narrow focus on rice production in the Green Revolution; on the other hand, agroecosystems could be analyzed as boundary objects deployed by scientists to facilitate collaboration across diverse actors within the network. However, the downplaying of public participation in agroecosystem analysis made it vulnerable to the co-option by authoritarian regimes, which primarily used the method to attract international funds and sacrificed its interdisciplinarity. Drawing from the rise and fall of agroecosystem analysis in Southeast Asia, the paper interprets contemporary agroecologists’ alliance with peasants’ struggle as a new round of boundary work seeking to resist the persistent threat of co-option while realizing the transformative potential of interdisciplinary research in food and agriculture.