Initiating agri‐environmental collaboration at landscape scale requires bridging structures, regional facilitators and addressing the expectations of actors

作者：S. Schüler, Isabelle Arimond, Annika L. Hass, Michael Koch, Jule Marie Huber, Volker Ruwisch, Manuel Bartens, Tobías Plieninger, Catrin Westphal · 发表于：People and Nature · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1002/pan3.10782 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Agricultural Innovations and Practices、Agriculture and Rural Development Research、Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Abstract To increase the effectiveness of agri‐environmental schemes, innovative approaches that focus on the landscape scale beyond individual fields and farms are widely discussed and tested. Central to these approaches is collaboration between several farmers and other actors in agricultural landscapes. The effectiveness of collaborative agri‐environmental initiatives is strongly related to the motivation of actors. Administrative and social issues might hamper actor decisions to join an initiative. Based on our experience in implementing a participatory landscape‐scale project in Germany, we raise the question in which ways actors can be motivated and empowered to participate in such initiatives and how collaborative approaches can stimulate and maintain the exchange of participants. We find that establishing bridging structures (for an equal exchange of ideas and experiences), identifying and involving regional facilitators (to promote the participation of farmers and other actors) and addressing the expectations of actors (e.g. regarding administrative burden) can jointly support the establishment of collaborative initiatives in agriculture. This is particularly relevant when local actors have little experience with joint measure implementation and institutional framework conditions for collaborative governance are limited or not provided. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.