Farmer participation in agri-environmental schemes : regionalisation and the role of bridging social capital

By M. Krom. 2017

118 citations recorded by the source corpus.

European agri-environmental schemes are being criticised for reinforcing rather than negating an opposition between agricultural production and environmental production, and for assuming instead of securing a public willingness to pay for agri-environmental change. This paper explores if a regionalisation of agri-environmental governance may contribute to overcome these criticisms. The paper empirically explores three regionalised agri-environmental schemes from Flanders, Belgium, with the use of 40 qualitative interviews with farmers and other relevant stakeholders. Building on the Bourdieusian theory of capital and the conceptual distinction between bonding and bridging social capital, the paper analyses whether and why the regionalised arrangements incited farmers to integrate environmental production in their farm management to meet other regional stakeholders’ demands for agri-environmental change. In doing so, the paper particularly focuses on the role of bridging social capital in fostering farmer participation in agri-environmental governance, which is a topic that—despite a growing scholarly recognition of the importance of social capital in mediating farmers’ environmental behaviour—has to date received scant conceptual and empirical attention. The paper reveals that farmers principally participated in the regionalised agri-environmental schemes to enhance the long-term viability of their agricultural businesses by building up more cooperative and appreciative, bridging social ties with other regional stakeholders. Notably, such participation is only likely to be substantive and lead to long-term, pro-environmental behaviour change of farmers, if farmers actually succeed in building up bridging social capital by receiving other regional stakeholders’ appreciation for their agri-environmental work. The paper ends with discussing the implications of these findings for the future design and implementation of socially and ecologically robust agri-environmental schemes.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c89c9f596fa4589ec7011969ffe886d82164d139

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1. Calum Brown
2. E. Kovacs
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5. S. Villamayor‐Tomas
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8. Antonia Galanaki

Citations in the corpus

• Simplistic understandings of farmer motivations could undermine the environmental potential of the common agricultural policy (2020, background): “Beyond these, specific characteristics increasing farmers’ openness and societal-554 identity (i.e. farmers perceiving their role in wider society as important) were found to 555 correlate positively with participation (de Krom, 2017; Gabel et al., 2018).”
• The economic potential of agroecology: Empirical evidence from Europe (2019, unknown): “The key challenge it faces is to bring about a cultural shift in the way farmers perceive ‘ good farming ’ (Krom, 2017; Dessein and Nevens, 2007; Knickel et al., 2018).”