Les savoirs agronomiques pour le développement : diversité et dynamiques de production

Cet article traite de la production de savoirs agronomiques pour le développement durable de l’agriculture, des systèmes alimentaires et des territoires. Dans la première partie, on s’intéresse à la production des savoirs qui seront mobilisés par un agriculteur ou un conseiller pour comprendre (connaissances fonctionnelles), pour agir (règles d’action), ou pour changer (démarches de diagnostic ou de conception de systèmes innovants). Dans la seconde partie, dédiée au développement des systèmes alimentaires et des territoires, on élagit le cercle d’acteurs considéré (acteurs des filières, consommateurs, pouvoirs publics, environnementalistes). Les savoirs pour comprendre, pour agir et pour changer sont produits de manière imbriquée, dans des démarches collectives, où les agronomes agissent sur le système sociotechnique pour en comprendre le fonctionnement, autant que pour en accompagner l’évolution.This paper is dedicated to the production of agronomic knowledge for the sustainable development of agriculture, food systems and territories. In a first part, focused on knowledge production for agricultural development, we analyze how agronomic knowledge is used by a farmer or by an advisor, either to understand (functional knowledge), or to act (action rules, decision support tools, actionable knowledge from selflearning), or to change (indicators for the assessment of cropping or farming systems performance, diagnosis or innovative system design approaches). Then, we present advantages and limits of various ways to produce agronomic knowledge: experiment, on farm studies, analysis of farmers’ practices, tracking innovative cropping systems, systemic modeling, etc. In a second part, focused on agronomic knowledge production for the sustainable development of food systems and teritories, a wider range of actors is considered. Besides farmers and advisors, actors from supply chains (including consumers), actors from territories and authorities (local, national and European) are concerned. The agronomic knowledge required is more diverse : each of these actors has his own strategy and questions. Experiment and modeling are less used; knowledge to understand, to act and to change are produced in a strong integrated way, in collective approaches engaging heterogeneous actors, where agronomists often act on the sociotechnical system to understand how it works, but also to support its change. To conclude, we underline that the know how of agronomists in systemic approach, built at field scale around the cropping system concept, prepared them to tackle other systems, at different scales (territory, food system, sociotechnical system), and to connect to other disciplines, required to produce agronomic knowledge for development