How can we know if organics becomes better? A perspectivist view on multicriteria assessment

Summary in the original language of the document

This paper aims to provide insights into the deeper challenges of making and communicating overall assessments of organic food systems.
Methods to do overall sustainability assessment are very different, they produce different assessments, and none of them can claim to have the ‘right’ answer. This paper aims to show some of the deeper challenges of making and communicating overall assessments of organic food systems, by investigating the role of scientific and stakeholder perspectives. Some results are that (1) sustainability is a paradoxical perspective, which relies on a multitude of specialised scientific perspectives; (2) assessments are based on built-in, but mostly hidden and sometimes incompatible values; and (3) the key to successful overall assessments is to make perspectives and values explicit in order to enable assessment of assessments in a participatory process. We conclude that there is a need to develop new participatory methods to handle perspectives and values in the preparation and communication of assessments of organic food systems.