The magnitude and urgency of the challenges facing agriculture and food systems demand profound modifications in different aspects of human activity to achieve real transformative change and sustainability. Recognizing that the inherent complexity of achieving sustainability is commonly seen as a deterrent to decision-making, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has approved the 10 Elements of Agroecology as an analytical framework to support the design of differentiated paths for agriculture and food systems transformation, hence facilitating improved decision-making by policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders in differing contexts at a range of levels on a number of scales.

Biodiversity, consumers, education and governance are identified as promising entry points to build a structured process using visual narratives that rely on the 10 Elements of Agroecology to graphically dissect prospective social-ecological transition trajectories. We illustrate such applications with examples from agroforestry worldwide, public food procurement in Brazil and the United States of America, and agroecology education vis-à-vis secure access to land in Senegal. Nexus approaches are used to highlight and examine salient interactions among different sectors and entry points, and to develop visual narratives describing plausible theories of transformative change towards sustainable agriculture and food systems.

The magnitude and complexity of sustainability challenges faced by agriculture, and humanity alike, highlight the profound modifications in different aspects of human activity needed to achieve transformative change. The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework recognizes that transformative change could be taking place simultaneously through many routes, at multiple locations, starting from different baseline conditions, and progressing at different rates. The diversity of trajectory options further highlights its flexibility and major opportunities for adapting actions to local realities. This suggests that the pace of transformative change of agriculture towards desired sustainability outcomes could possibly be faster than anticipated and hence hold greater prospects to achieving the SDGs by 2030.

The 10 Elements of Agroecology framework is not without criticism, particularly because of the heterogeneity of the different elements, including systems of numerous components in which major interactions can be non-linear, interdependent and involve feedback loops, as well as the difficulty of identifying valid thresholds to assess more sustainable development trajectories. Despite these limitations, we consider the 10 Elements of Agroecology to be useful for framing the recognized complexity of food and agricultural systems, into a simplified, yet holistic version of reality that can facilitate decision-making by policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders at different scales along agroecological transitions towards sustainable agriculture and food systems (Biovision 2019; HLPE 2019; INKOTA 2019; Anderson et al. 2019a). Furthermore, this type of structure can allow different stakeholders to articulate challenges faced, build consensus towards desired goals, use a common language when sharing information on the status of implementation, and encourage collective action and alignment towards achieving the greatest possible impact.

Nevertheless, key knowledge gaps remain:

There is a need to develop or adapt methodological tools to facilitate integrative thinking and co-creation processes that recognize the value of linking ecological sciences with social sciences, incorporate knowledge that may originate outside of conventional paradigms of science, and embrace culture and food traditions through participatory and action-oriented approaches to research.

There is need for better understanding of what works in what contexts in agricultural and food systems – in terms of spatial and temporal scale dynamics, including feedback mechanisms – in order to support system re-design efforts aiming at maximizing synergies and complementarities and minimizing trade-offs.

Despite their crucial role in strengthening resilience in agroecology, we know little about how system components react to more than one environmental or social factor at a time. A better understanding of the impact of increasing the number of interacting and simultaneous global change factors on system change would also be important.

Developing or adapting existing multidimensional assessment tools (e.g. Grabowski et al. 2018; FAO 2019g; van Wijk et al. 2020) is also central to building such understanding of change and predicting the magnitude of such change across scales, time and place.

Given the crosscutting nature of knowledge gaps identified, improvements achieved addressing any of them could significantly contribute to the different nexus examples highlighted in this paper hence the potential remains for the 10 Elements of Agroecology framework to further facilitate linking knowledge to action.

The 10 elements as a framework helps to think about systems in a broad sense beyond focusing on specific problems, encourages thinking beyond the farm level (i.e. landscapes and community levels), and shows that manageable levels of complexity – consistent with a holistic approach – need not be a burden to promote transformation.