International audienceThe concepts of sustainable development and multifunctional agriculture are at the origin of several efforts aiming at their clarification and the development of methods to make them operational. The main principles of agricultural sustainability stress the importance of economic viability, environmental protection and social equity. For farms and farmers, the concept of sustainability is commonly grounded by methods and tools to evaluate their contribution these principles. These methods and tools, abundantly developed in France (IDEA, DIALECTE, ARBRE ...) are commonly based on a fixed set of criteria and indicators chosen a priori, a series of preset measurement and monitoring methods to quantify indicators and aggregation and weighting methods aiming at a single note for the sustainability of the farm. The objective of this contribution is to critically review such types of methods and tools showing their unsuitability for common cases in the context of French agriculture such as (i) farms in transition phases or aiming at radical changes in the farming activities, (ii) multifunctional farms or farms strongly dependent upon off-farm activities and (iii) farms inserted in a territory where their sustainability depends on the spatial and organizational arrangements among different farms. The contribution concludes with some principle to develop evaluation approaches to overcome some of the limitations of existing methods
