Consolidation of shared sustainability visions through deliberative multicriteria evaluation in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities

Sustainability transitions in smallholder agriculture depend on how local communities understand and prioritise different futures, yet most assessment tools rely on externally defined criteria and expert-led evaluations. This study examines how deliberation shapes cocoa farmers’ evaluations of sustainability pathways. In two-day workshops with eight farmer groups (n = 36) in two regions of Ecuador (Amazon and Coast), farmers evaluated four scenarios using intuitive ranking, urgency ratings, and swing-weighting, based on sustainability criteria they had generated in a prior Photovoice process. We compared intuitive and criteria-based rankings of scenarios and calculated indices of individual deliberative reasoning and intersubjective consensus before and after deliberation. In the Amazon, where intuitive scenario preferences diverged, deliberation led all groups to converge on the same scenario rankings and to reweight criteria towards long-term environmental and social concerns. Importance-consensus and individual reasoning indices increased modestly, indicating tighter alignment between what farmers valued and the futures they preferred. In the Coastal region, groups already shared a strong preference for an environmentally restorative scenario. Deliberation primarily reinforced this consensus, substantially increasing agreement on the prioritisation of sustainability criteria while leaving overall scenario rankings unchanged. Across regions, some groups showed closer alignment between intuitive and criteria-based rankings after deliberation, while others diverged, suggesting that deliberation can both stabilise and reconfigure preferences as trade-offs are recognised. The results show that deliberative multicriteria evaluation, when grounded in community-generated criteria and narratives, can articulate and consolidate shared sustainability visions even where prior engagement has already fostered high agreement. The deliberation indices proposed here provide a transferable framework for tracking learning, reasoning, and consensus in participatory planning, supporting the design of more context-sensitive sustainability interventions.Author summary: How do farming communities decide what a good future looks like? In this study, we worked with 36 cocoa farmers in two regions of Ecuador (one in the Amazon, the other on the Coast) to find out. Over two days, farmers discussed and evaluated four possible futures for their communities, using criteria they themselves had defined in earlier workshops. We measured how these structured discussions changed their preferences and the consistency of their reasoning. In the Amazon, groups that initially disagreed came to a shared vision of the future they wanted; on the Coast, where farmers already agreed, discussion helped clarify “why” they agreed. In both cases, farmers prioritised ecological health and social cohesion over short-term economic gains. Our approach shows that when communities are given appropriate tools and time, they can engage in sophisticated collective deliberation about sustainability. The indices we developed to track changes in reasoning and agreement could be used in other participatory planning contexts.