Postproductivist and Multifunctional Agriculture

The notions of both postproductivism and multifunctionality and their practical extensions and applications - postproductivist agriculture and multifunctional agriculture - emerged out of a series of debates that began from the 1990s over the ostensibly changing character of farming and rural society in the so-called developed world. In some respects, the postproductivist transition (PPT) resembled the debate in economic and industrial geography circles over the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, and the food regimes concepts developed by rural sociologists. Ultimately, though, the dualistic and overly simplistic conceptualization of agricultural change at the core of the PPT framework saw most researchers abandon it for more rigorous and conceptually sophisticated explanatory frameworks - such as multifunctionality - that better accounted for the coexistence in space/time of differing modes of land use and occupance.