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Competence Centre on Behavioural Insights

We support policymaking with evidence on human behaviour

  • Topic / Tool | Last updated: 10 Oct 2024

Behavioural insights for agriculture

European farmers are key to a sustainable EU. Understanding farmers’ decisions can lead to more effective agricultural policies.

Behavioural insights

Why behavioural insights matter

Farmers regularly take decisions that affect both their profitability and the environment. For instance, they choose which crop to grow, whether to invest in a new barn, how much pesticide to spray, and whether to join a cooperative.

Behavioural insights can help us better understand how and why farmers make these decisions. For instance:

  • mutual trust is fundamental for farmers to join producer organisations.
  • farmers are more likely to establish filter strips when they perceive clear environmental benefits for watershed protection.
  • farmers tend to adopt organic practices more if they sense social pressure in that direction.

Understanding these behavioural factors can contribute to more effective and efficient agricultural policies.

 

How behavioural insights can help

The post-2020 reform on the EU Common Agricultural Policy embeds behavioural evidence in the following documents:

Behavioural experiments can also help assess in advance the effect of policy options on farmers' decisions.

 

Ongoing projects

 

Selected publications

 

Farmers and the new green architecture of the EU common agricultural policy: a behavioural experiment

This behavioural experiment with farmers assessed the effect of two policy features of the new green architecture of the EU common agricultural policy on the adoption of environmentally friendly practices: (1) increasing mandatory adoption and (2) shifting budget to voluntary schemes. Results shed light on behavioural patterns, highlighting potential trade-offs between mandatory and voluntary schemes to increase agriculture’s environmental and climate performance.

Behavioural factors affecting the adoption of sustainable farming practices: a policy-oriented review

This paper reviews the findings from the last 20 years on the behavioural factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt environmentally sustainable practices. It also proposes policy options to increase adoption, based on these behavioural factors and embedded in the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Behavioural factors are grouped into three clusters, from more distal to more proximal: (i) dispositional factors; (ii) social factors and (iii) cognitive factors. Overall, the review demonstrates that considering behavioural factors enriches economic analyses of farmer decision-making, and can lead to more realistic and effective agri-environmental policies.

Farmers’ views on EU agri-environmental policies

For the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to be a success, it is necessary to understand farmers' decision-making and viewpoints beyond the assumptions made by neoclassical economics, because farmers' motivations are not only driven by profit maximisation. In this context, a qualitative study (focus groups) was conducted to better understand farmers' experience with the three CAP instruments designed to motivate them to adopt more environmentally-friendly practices: cross compliance, green direct payments (i.e., 'greening') and voluntary agri-environmental and climate measures. This report was published as an annex to the Impact Assessment accompanying the Proposals for a Regulation establishing rules on support for strategic plans to be drawn up by Member States under the Common agricultural policy (EUR-Lex - 52018SC0301).

(How) can economic experiments inform EU agricultural policy?

This report provides an overview of the potential contribution of economic experiments to the Common Agricultural Policy evaluation toolbox. The methodology of economic experiments is briefly described in chapter 2. Chapter 3 presents examples of experimental studies relevant for the analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy. Chapter 4 discusses whether there is room for economic experiments in the EU evaluation toolbox. Chapter 5 identifies the main challenges when implementing economic experiments. Chapter 6 provides a set of recommendations, arising from the discussions between the authors of this report and policy officers from DG AGRI, relative to the introduction of economic experiments in the CAP evaluation toolbox.

 

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