Analyzing policy discourse for agroecological possibilities: a theoretical and methodological contribution

With more organizations committing their policies to sustainable and inclusive agricultural development, it becomes important to understand the underlying meaning, politics, and intentions that underpin these policy goals. Agroecology offers a comprehensive agenda for transforming the food system toward more equitable, sustainable, and self-reliant communities. Food system development discourse appears to mediate agroecological possibilities, yet we lack methodological and theoretical approaches through which to evaluate this. With this research, we combined Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with a typology of agroecological discourse to analyze the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) policy on self-reliance. We tested this approach on the self-reliance policy framework because, depending on how self-reliance is discursively positioned, it can align with agroecological transformation. Findings reveal how the United States’ emphasis on inclusivity, locally driven agendas, and environmental concerns could be entry points for agroecology. However, through careful reading using CDA and the agroecological typology, our analysis reveals how USAID’s discourse suggests a highly problematic environment for supporting agroecology that forecloses on agroecology’s multifunctional outcomes by prioritizing market-led and technocratic development approaches. Our research contributes theoretically and methodologically by revealing how our unique approach could be extended to identify agroecological possibilities in seemingly aligned texts and to evaluate agroecological alignment in policy discourse that explicitly prioritizes agroecology.