Agroecology, scaling and interdisciplinarity Tommy Dalgaard (a),[*]*, Nicholas J. Hutchings (a), John R. Porter (b)(a) Department of Agroecology, Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences. P.O. Box 50. DK-8830 Tjele, Denmark.(b) Department of Agricultural Sciences, The Royal Veterinary and A.gricultural University, Agrovej 10, DK-2630 Taastrup, Denmark.Received 9 October 2001; received in revised form 11 April 2003; accepted 15 April 2003AbstractBased on a review of its history, its present structure and its objective in the future, agroecology is defined as an integrative discipline that includes elements from agronomy, ecology, sociology and economics. Agroecology's credentials as a separate scientific discipline were measured against the norms of science, defined by Robert King Merton (1973): communalism, universality, disinterestedness, originality and doubt. It is concluded that agroecology meets many of these norms and where it differs, it does so in a way that perhaps anticipates the manner and the direction in which the social position of science is changing.Accepting agroecology as a separate scientific discipline, the two main issues with which it most contend were considered to be those of scaling and interdisciplinarity. Scaling is a problem because results of agroecological research are typically generated at small spatial scales whereas applications are frequently implemented in larger, administrative units. A frame-­work to convey information from science to decision-makers was proposed and tested in a case study of farm energy use. Interdisciplinarity is a problem because researchers from different disciplines see the world from different viewpoints, use different language, work at different locations and use different criteria to evaluate one another's work. Progress in this area is likely to be slow and driven by the need to justify the value of science to society.02003 Elsevier B.Y. All rights reserved.Keywords: Agroecology; Discipline; Food production systems; Hierarchy; Interdisciplinarity; Mertonian norms; Scale; Sustainability1. IntroductionA major challenge facing the world is how a 21st century population of perhaps 9 billion people will feed themselves in a sustainable manner (Evans, 1998). During the 20th century, a doubled population was fed via the so-called Green Revolution, with its introduction of pesticides, synthetic fertilisers and new high-yielding cultivars. With the reduction in the proportion of hungering people from more than 50% of the total population after World War II to under 20% today (Grigg, 1993), the success of this revolution is indisputable. However, there are still malnourished people and the impacts of intensive agriculture on natural resource degradation and the environment may not be sustainable (Brown el at., 2000). The proposed role of agroecology is to facilitate the design and management of sustainable food production systems (Gliessman, 1998), and to investigate possible synergisms that can help alleviate the above problems (Altieri, 1990). However, agroecology has not fully matured as a scientific discipline. In this paper, the definition and scientific method of agroecology, its credentials as a scientific discipline and the challenges that face it are considered. The intention is to establish a general framework for the integration of information within agroecology, and for the communication of this information to the decision-makers targeted. Here, it is recognised that the rationale for agroecology is currently the need to develop sustainable