ABSTRACT
Agroecosystem health and sustainability are value-based and change-oriented concepts. Both require that issues concerning people, power, and praxis be explicitly addressed. Active participation of communities in agroecosystem health and sustainability assessment and implementation is based on four key principles. The first is that those who experience a socioeconomic phenomenon are the most qualified to describe and investigate it (DePoy et al., 1999). The second is based on the proposition by Lewin that causal inferences about human activity systems are more likely to be valid when the human beings in question participate in building and testing them (Argyris and Schon, 1991). The Freirian theme that poor people can and should be enabled to conduct an analysis of their own reality (Freire, 1968) is another predicate for the inclusion of communities in the process.
