Speakers
Description
Setting the achievement of environmental objectives, instead of the adoption of specific management practices, as a contractual requirements of agri-environment payment schemes such as agri-environmental and climate schemes (AECS) in Europe, has been proposed as solution to improve their effectiveness (Wuepper and Huber 2021). Farmers’ participation in these payment schemes being voluntary, their impact on the environment relies in part on farmers’ willingness to participate. Understanding farmers preferences for alternative scheme designs is therefore an important part of their ex ante evaluation, as these preferences can largely impact the benefit-cost ratio of these interventions by influencing the level of payment required by farmers to participate. So far, the literature on farmers’ preferences for result-based schemes and practice-based schemes shows that farmers’ preferences for alternative designs of AECS are heterogeneous between farmers (e.g. Niskanen et al. 2021, Sumrada et al. 2022, Gars et al. 2024). This paper aims to investigate the sources of this heterogeneity. We build on the discrete choice experiment data from Gars et al. (2024), collected on 731 farmers in the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. We investigate the role of time, risk and environmental preferences (perception of environmental issues and change, awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility) as well as confidence in monitoring and perceived control (ability to adopt practices and ability to achieve environmental objectives) over the schemes’ requirements on farmers' preferences for alternative scheme designs. Since these preferences are not directly observable, we use a hybrid choice model, which models these preferences as latent variables. These latent variables influence both farmers’ preferences for alternative scheme designs expressed through their choices in the DCE and their responses to statements used as indicators of preferences in the survey (7 points likert scale). The data analysis is ongoing and first results will be presented. Alternative hybrid choice models are tested and compared using goodness of fit indicators. These show, so far, that higher levels in confidence in monitoring and in one’s perceived ability to fulfil the contract’s requirements increase farmers’ willingness to practice-based, results-based and hybrid schemes without altering preferences between the designs.
| Status of your work | First results |
|---|---|
| Early Career Researcher Award | No, the paper is not eligible |
