Using a view of livestock farms as social-ecological systems to study the local variety in their trajectories of change

In the Pyrenees National Park (France), as in other European mountain areas, the decline of agriculture and the reforestation of agricultural landscapes depress many assets of local importance for rural development. In comparison with other mountain areas, the relatively high capacity of Pyrenean family farms to survive is being increasingly challenged by growing uncertainties in the local and global social-economic environment. Rural development stakeholders thus place increasing value on the maintenance of livestock farms and on their multifunctional role in landscape management. In this paper we present the results of a tentative analysis to improve assessment of variety in the longterm patterns of change in individual family farms of the current farm population by means of a case study. We combined a conceptual model of a family farms as a social-ecological system and multivariate analysis to build a typology of the histories of 24 family farms in the study area, and to explain their individual development paths since 1950. Our approach allowed us to distinguish four groups of farm trajectories. These are compared with the different types of temporal patterns of change in the family farms in our sample. Our results confirm the importance of considering family dynamics to explain farm trajectories.