Evaluating tools and methods for agroecosystem sustainability and performance: a critical review

The sustainability and performance of agroecosystems are critical for confronting global challenges, from food security to biodiversity loss. This critical narrative review synthesizes 137 peer-reviewed sources and grey literature documents (2000-2024) to interrogate the epistemological assumptions, power dynamics, and contextual appropriateness of sustainability assessment frameworks. This comprehensive review systematically analyzes the diverse tools and methodologies; including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE), Framework for the Evaluation of Natural Resource Management Systems Incorporating Sustainability Indicators (MESMIS), and Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE); used to evaluate this sustainability. This analysis moves beyond a simple comparison to offer a critical interrogation of these frameworks, exposing a fundamental tension between reductionist tools that offer precise, quantifiable data but often miss systemic interactions, and holistic, participatory approaches that capture socio-ecological complexity but struggle with standardization and scalability. This review underscores that sustainability assessment is not a neutral technical exercise but a value-laden process fraught with trade-offs, power dynamics, and epistemological conflicts, particularly between scientific and indigenous knowledge systems. The transformative potential of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and remote sensing is examined, while cautioning against technological optimism that risks exacerbating inequities. Ultimately, this review argues for a shift towards reflexive, pluralistic assessment processes that prioritize equity, adaptive learning, and critical independence over standardized scoring, providing practical heuristics for researchers and practitioners navigating methodological trade-offs in diverse contexts.