Informed decisions on 'agricultural transformation', the rapidly changing diversity of agricultural holdings, could play a decisive role in society's response to several global challenges, including food security and environmental sustainability. Improved stakeholder access to information on the social, economic and environmental impacts of transformations and likely future trends is a key requirement for promoting evidence-based decision making in related policy formulation and planning. The World Agricultural Watch (WAW) has recently been proposed as a platform for continuous global monitoring of agricultural transformation. This paper presents its methodological framework - i.e. an integrated set of monitoring activities and associated methods which would provide key information that stakeholders could use to influence future outcomes of transformations. Based on the premise that different types of agricultural holding contribute in significantly dissimilar ways to societal goals, the framework proposes an approach using indicators for (a) developing an internationally-comparable typology of agricultural holdings, and (b) assessing the short-term outcomes on food security and environmental sustainability of different types of holdings, while taking into account influencing factors at larger territorial scales. When developed, the typology will accommodate further detailing to meet specific sub national needs in various farming-system settings throughout the world. It would also be useful in guiding future statistical data collection for which distinction among holding types is important. Preliminary results from on-going research on the development of a typology for the cotton zone of Mali are presented.