ABSTRACT
Sustainability models are in constant change, depending on new technologies, research findings, social progress and innovations, and also predominant currents of thought, all of which model policies, from local to state levels. The Sustainable Development Goals have contributed to raising one important issue for unsustainability: Rooted inequities that prevail in many aspects of live and are reflected in lack of access, unrecognized assets, income inequality, and social injustice. These are mostly suffered by rural communities and communities which inhabit peri-urban spaces of countries still considered “developing”. One strong answer that has trickled up in the last 10 to 15 years is agroecology, providing frames of thought and action which allow to re-visit what traditional knowledge can do in order not only to improve material conditions of societies and its people, but also to regain pride in what is actually there and has been for a while, but which has been obliterated with growing commercial policies, including the introduction of technological products that replace local ones that may need more work or different household organization difficult in modern times. Agroecology is not only the recovery of traditional knowledge and is not the competence of the agricultural field alone, but also a discipline that encourages to take actions toward sovereignty in many aspects of community life: Health, food production, nutrition, energy, and decision-making. It does not imply the rejection of external aid or external technology, but the non-dependency of it, providing methodologies such as dialogues for knowledge co-production and participatory action research which invite actors to put over the table what they know, want, and can do in order to take action for problem solving. One may say that agroecology is the new face of sustainability, providing fresh (not new) frames of action for contributing to policy making and for tangible improvements in daily life. This chapter will address a brief recap of sustainability essentials, parting from its original Brundtland commission definition, a summary of its main shapes in policies around the world (food security, environmental services, green technologies, etc.), followed by the main philosophic and methodological frames that are offered by agroecology currently, in order to analyze the link between both concepts and highlighting what agroecology can provide for sustainability in the shape of economic, social, and environmental impacts.
