Sustainable intensification: A UK perspective

Sustainable intensification (SI) is a term that has increasingly been used to describe the agricultural production systems that will be needed to feed a growing global population whilst ensuring adequate ecosystem service provision. However, key definitions of SI support quite different approaches; a report published by the Royal Society (Baulcombe et al., 2009) favours the land sparing model whilst a Foresight report (2011) favours land sharing. SI will require pragmatic and innovative policies, including further revision of the Environmental Stewardship Scheme and the development of landscape-scale governance within an over-arching strategic approach to planning. However, its innovation is its focus on unlocking the social at the expense of the private value of land (at those locations where non-market ecosystem services have a higher value than marketable agricultural products). Though scientific advances may help raise production efficiency through a better understanding of the trade-offs between agricultural production and ecosystem service provision, issues related to who controls the use of land will be the most difficult to resolve, which suggests a role for Boundary Organisational Theory (BOT) because of the insights this theory lends to negotiating complex problems. Within BOT terminology SI can be considered a “boundary object” about which stakeholders are able to negotiate site-specific issues to incrementally arrive at solutions which draw on the full range of land sharing and land sparing options and so avoid prescriptive approaches and technologies.