Evaluating the functionality of agricultural systems: social preferences for multifunctional peri-urban agriculture. The “Huerta de Valencia” as case study

Abstract

The debate on the multifunctionality of agriculture and its connections with territorial policies are the basis of the most appropriate approach to legitimize public interventions in the agricultural sector. The main obstacle of this public intervention is to know the goods and services provided by agricultural systems and elicitation of the social preferences for them. We created a descriptive approach for the multifunctionality of agricultural systems that is based on the review of the scientific literature focused on multifunctionality and the goods and services of agricultural systems. The review shows a large variety of activities and approaches, which can be grouped by their economic dimension, social dimension and environmental dimension. Multicriteria techniques, such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), can help elicit the priorities and the relative importance of different functions attributed by the society as a whole. The authorities can take into account these results to inform and support their political decisions. This paper describes a methodological approach to determine the Social Welfare Function by using AHP. The proposed methodology is applied to the “Huerta de Valencia”, a rich peri-urban agricultural system with a variety of resources, around which there is an open political-institutional debate to define a protection scheme. The results are very interesting and useful to enrich this debate.

A New Collaborative Methodology for Assessment and Management of Ecosystem Services

“…AHP is the most widely used MCDA method in natural resource planning, especially when the stakeholders are involved in the process [16,32]. We propose AHP as a method to elicit stakeholder views on the importance of ESS in the management of protected areas as we believe this provides a mechanism with good properties to elicit and aggregate preferences.…”

l’Horta De València: Past and present dynamics in landscape change and planning

“…As a space for food production, it contributes to food security, food sovereignty and food justice within a regional food supply chain based on its proximity to the city. In addition, peri-urban farmland is also appreciated from a recreational and leisure perspective and this has been documented in the case of l'Horta [28]. The importance of l'Horta for society lies in the combination of these elements: the physical material heritage, the cultural and historical dimension and its functional and aesthetic value.…”

Peri-Urban Food Production and Its Relation to Urban Resilience

“…Such methods are also well-suited to peri-urban food production as they facilitate the co-production of a number of ecosystem services including recreation, which responds to the demands of the urban population. Another dimension of multifunctional food production is its potential for knowledge generation and cultural exchange in the food production activities with positive implications for the integration of different cultures, social cohesion and social sustainability [33]. New research states that access to nature and diverse ecosystems, e.g., cultural landscapes with a high diversity of habitats and species, has positive and enhancing effect on human health including both physical and psychological dimensions [34,35].…”