Supporting Decision for Environment-Friendly Practices in the Agri-Food Sector: When Argumentation and System Dynamics Simulation Complete Each Other

High-level decision-making, such as policy making, needs to take into account the often-conflicting interests of different stakeholders with the goal of finding solutions to provide trade-offs and build consensus towards the adoption of so-called win-win solutions. In this article, the authors suggest that using a modeling and simulation approach would greatly enrich the deliberation process. The authors propose a systematic method to assess possible options, based on the complementarity of argumentation modeling and system dynamics (SD) simulation, in conjunction with field experimentation. As a practical application, the authors assess various options available to agri-food chain stakeholders when considering the adoption of cereal-legume intercrops as an alternative to sole crops. Taking advantage of the argument analysis, SD simulations are used to: 1) compare different cultural strategies available to farmers in current operating, market and regulatory conditions; 2) propose plausible what-if scenarios anticipating technological progress, and exploring the impact of adopting potential incentives and dissuasive regulatory measures.