Sustainable food production through the principles of agroecology implies several simultaneous transitions at different scales, levels, and dimensions, of a social, biological, economic, cultural, institutional, political nature. To describe these transitions the use of different conceptual frameworks, derived from ecology, agronomy, and the science of innovation, are proposed.

The article addresses the agroecological transition as a succession of emerging innovations and analyses the stages of the technical-institutional transition and its drivers. It is also proposed to conceptualize the transition as a restoration of the functions and resilience of the socio-ecosystem. Finally, we explore with a couple of examples what the transition implies in terms of changes in agricultural management practices.

The agroecological transition can involve the optimization of management practices to increase production efficiency, and input substitution, or the redesign of the system. The examples analyzed to show that the transition does not always start from highly industrialized and/ or degraded systems.

Many producers who do not consider themselves agroecological implement however many agroecological-based practices. It is concluded that the transition to agroecology implies a technical-productive transition at the subsystems of the farm, a socio-ecological transition at the level of the rural family, its community, and its landscape, and a political-institutional transition at the level of territories, regions, and countries. Understanding the transition as the interdependence between scales and dimensions allows reconciling the looks of the different ´schools´ of agroecology, from the most ecological to the most socio-political.