The prospects of innovative agri-environmental contracts in the European policy context: Results from a Delphi study
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Innovative agri-environmental contracts are increasingly studied in the literature, but their adoption has been relatively slow and geographically scattered. Action-based agri-environmental measures remain the predominant policy mechanism across Europe. A three-round Policy Delphi study was conducted with policy makers, scientific experts, farmers’ representatives, and NGOs from across 15 different European countries, to investigate how and under which circumstances novel contractual solutions could be implemented more widely. The expert panel perceived result-based and collective contractual elements as the most promising. Although considered beneficial from several aspects, value chain contracts were perceived less relevant to the policy environment. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Pillar 2 measures were highlighted by the experts as the key policy area to implement novel contracts by national or regional authorities, but Pillar 1 eco-schemes, being launched in the CAP 2023–2027, were also considered as a potentially suitable framework for testing and implementation. The Delphi panel envisaged innovative contracts should be adopted by governments in iterative steps and not as a complete substitute for current payment schemes, but rather as an additional incentive to them. Such an incremental approach allows contractual innovations to capitalise on existing best practices. But it also implies the risk that innovative contracts could remain marginal and fail to substantially change farmers’ behaviour, resulting in a failure to improve environmental conditions.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Artikelnummer | 106706 |
| Tidsskrift | Land Use Policy |
| Vol/bind | 131 |
| Antal sider | 12 |
| ISSN | 0264-8377 |
| DOI | |
| Status | Udgivet - 2023 |
Bibliografisk note
Funding Information:
This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No 818190. Boldizsár Megyesi was supported by the Bolyai János Postdoctoral Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. We would like to thank all participating experts for their valuable contributions. We are grateful to György Pataki and Mikołaj Czajkowski for providing comments and suggestions to earlier drafts of this paper, and to Edward Ott for administrative and editing support. We thank Didier Buffière and Lisa Deijl for their help in reaching out to potential Delphi experts, and Balázs Sipos for his support with the graphic design. Finally, we express our gratitude to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which helped us strengthen the paper.
Funding Information:
Non-state-initiated contracts, like different certification schemes and value chain approaches, are fairly widespread and also supported by the CAP. Respondents assume that certification systems have a favourable impact on farmers' position in the value chain and also on food provisioning. To reach these goals, this measure was considered the most powerful, but also its impacts on livelihood security and biodiversity were perceived positively. Despite this, value chain contracts were less favoured (compared to the other contract types) and often disputed by the experts. The disputes were condensed around two focal points. First, some experts doubted that value chain contracts could effectively target ecological objectives and mentioned the risk of greenwashing. Second, several experts argued that market-based solutions should not be part of the CAP to avoid spending public money on private benefits. This argument appeared occasionally, although the phenomenon is already present in the CAP, not only through the payments for organic farming, but also in the case of area-based payments (i.e., public money is paid to support the realisation of private benefits). One possible way of dealing with this perplexity around public and private funds and interests in agriculture could be enhancing the role of private initiatives. Value-chain or land tenure approaches could complement and strengthen the intentions of agri-environmental policy without necessarily allocating more public money to private actors, but by re-allocating private money across the actors of the whole value chain. This would require, however, that legislation increasingly focuses on the whole agri-food system and initiates steps to reduce the system-level distortions caused by CAP subsidies.
Funding Information:
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No 818190 . Boldizsár Megyesi was supported by the Bolyai János Postdoctoral Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences . We would like to thank all participating experts for their valuable contributions. We are grateful to György Pataki and Mikołaj Czajkowski for providing comments and suggestions to earlier drafts of this paper, and to Edward Ott for administrative and editing support. We thank Didier Buffière and Lisa Deijl for their help in reaching out to potential Delphi experts, and Balázs Sipos for his support with the graphic design. Finally, we express our gratitude to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which helped us strengthen the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors
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