A total of 26 communications were presented at the CIRAD scientific workshop "Towards a multi-scale approach for improving pest management", October 4-5, Montpellier, France. They encompassed a high diversity of scientific issues and approaches in contrasted sociological and environmental perspectives. A general questioning (who, what, where, when, how, and why?) was addressed to each presentation. From a vocabulary-based analysis (generalization), we propose a framework aimed at contextualizing issues and approaches in relation to scientific teams / research institutions, agro-ecosystem environment, issues, dynamics in space and time, objectives, and methods.