For sustainable agriculture to succeed, policy formulation must arise in a new way. Policy processes must be enabling and participatory, creating the conditions for sustainable development based more on locally available resources and on local skills and knowledge. Effective policy processes will have to bring together a range of actors and institutions for creative interaction and address multiple realities and unpredictability.

The management of higher level systems, whether common grazing lands, fisheries resources, communal forests, national parks, and watersheds, requires social organization comprising the key stakeholders. All successful moves to more sustainable agriculture have in common coordinated action by groups or communities at the local level. But the problem is that platforms for resource use negotiation generally do not exist, and so need to be created and facilitated.

Different methodologies are emerging to help stakeholders achieve collective resource management capacity. Well known ones are participatory rapid appraisal (PRA) and other related methodologies. In addition, the soft system methodology (SSM) developed for a corporate environment is highly promising for resource use negotiation. For stakeholders who have come to appreciate the fact that they share a problem, SSM takes them through a number of steps which allow them to create a "rich picture" on the basis of their multiple perspectives, reach some accommodation with respect to major causes of the problem, and hence decide on collective action.