Interested in
Empowering farmers for environment
Agri-env. policies support farmers to take environmental action. Despite their merits, the effects are mixed and farmers often perceive them as too rigid/prescriptive. On top, they are generally designed at farmer/plot level, while more impact could be reached by cooperation on landscape level. There is thus a need for more alternative approaches that encourage farmers to engage in bottom-up cooperation. Although some EU regions are already achieving promising results with more results-oriented and cooperative approaches, the integration of these concepts into regional agri-environmental policies is still very limited. What are the barriers for this and how can they be overcome? What other policy actions are effective in bringing about more bottom-up engagement and cooperation? To speed up this process, setting-up policy pilots, exchange between leader-follower regions and cooperation with farmers and policy-makers could be very instrumental.