How well is farmers’ social situation captured by sustainability assessment tools? A Swedish case study

Abstract

Recent research indicates that sustainability assessment tools (SAT) for farms need to be contextually adapted to be acceptable and useful. Focusing specifically on social sustainability, this study sought to identify important aspects of relevance for Swedish (livestock) farmers' social situation and compare these aspects with social indicators used in three existing SATs (RISE, SAFA, IDEA). A survey revealed that social issues of key importance for the self-reported overall life satisfaction of Swedish livestock farmers are: having a good financial situation, having a similar standard of living as others, not experiencing too much stress, having meaningful work, having decent working hours, and having a desirable family situation. Of the three SATs evaluated, RISE appears best equipped to capture the social situation of Swedish farmers but does not fully address the aspect of finding work meaningful. SAFA and IDEA both fail to capture many aspects of importance for describing the social situation of Swedish farmers. We present a novel method for testing the relevance of social indicators for farmers in a specific context. Applying this method before choosing, applying, and adapting SATs for farm-level sustainability assessments would increase the relevance of the social sustainability dimension, but deeper stakeholder engagement than offered by our survey is needed.

Between the Social and Economic Dimensions of Sustainability in Rural Areas—In Search of Farmers’ Quality of Life

“…Our research was based on an assumption-shared also by López-Ruiz [141], Sachs [11], and the UN [150]-that quality of life is a general aim of sustainable development. Undoubtedly, it is also one of the important factors influencing farms' sustainability [98,[151][152][153][154]. Research dealing with life quality (not only of farmers but of other social groups, as well) usually contains construction and analyses of subjective and objective indices, see [141].…”

“…Even though some of the authors include social indicators while assessing agricultural sustainability [32,33], they usually concentrate on the status of the family, ways of supporting decision-making, living conditions, involvement in community issues or safety-not treating the quality of life (QoL) as a whole. Moreover, the available tools are useful for assessing the social situation of farmers only to a limited extent [98].…”

Integrated Sustainability Assessment of Divergent Mediterranean Farming Systems: Cyprus as a Case Study

“…Thus, we acknowledge that, in a further development of this framework, the list of environmental indicators should be extended, including key environmental aspects, like pesticides use and GHG emissions. In contrast, socioeconomic dimensions were well-represented here, whereas others did not take into account social and/or economic aspects [1,7,9,10,15]. In fact, important socioeconomic indicators that help understanding the dynamics of FSs, such as disposable income and off/non-farm income [21], were not considered in other studies probably due to their sensitive nature (farmers often appear reluctant to provide such information), or because these studies were conducted on the basis of existing datasets without any information on such indicators [42].…”

“…The most common approach to assess agricultural sustainability relates to the use of indicators [7,9,10]. Consequently, a large number of indicator-based sustainability assessment tools already exist and are applied in practice [2,3].…”

“…Most of the assessments focus on the environmental pillar and give little or no attention to social and economic pillars [1,5,7,10,19]. Such assessments are not holistic and cannot be used for integrated sustainability evaluation of FSs [3,6].…”