Case studies: Climate

This manuscript, prepared under Work Package 3 (WP3) of the VISIONARY project, contributes to the overarching aim of identifying policy levers that can support transitions towards sustainable farming and food systems in Europe. WP3 investigates how behavioural approaches and experimental methods can help design effective agri-environmental policy interventions to address three key transition challenges: climate neutrality, halting biodiversity loss, and improving water quality. In this context, the manuscript focuses on the role of behavioural drivers — cognitive, social, and dispositional factors that shape human decision-making — in determining farmers' responses to economic policy instruments designed to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture.

The manuscript presents findings from two complementary experimental studies. The first study investigates Italian dairy farmers' preferences for alternative payment schemes aimed at incentivising the adoption of essential oil feed supplements to reduce enteric methane emissions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment with 120 farmers in the Autonomous Province of Trento, it elicits willingness to accept Action-Based Payments (ABPs), Results-Based Payments (RBPs) framed either as an Agri-Environmental Climate Scheme or a voluntary carbon market, and Hybrid Payment (HP) designs combining both components. The second study examines Danish farmers' beliefs about the economic impacts of a CO₂e tax on agriculture and tests whether providing expert information can reduce misperceptions and increase policy support. It draws on a randomised survey experiment with 981 farmers, conducted in the context of Denmark's actual CO₂e tax proposals at both high (750 DKK/tonne) and low (125 DKK/tonne) stringency levels.

The results demonstrate that behavioural drivers are central mediators of farmers' acceptance of climate policy instruments. Italian dairy farmers show a general preference for ABPs over RBPs, driven by familiarity, certainty preference, and reduced complexity, though acceptance of innovative payment mechanisms improves substantially when pro-environmental attitudes are present, risk aversion is lower, and farmers have higher perceived behavioural control over the implementation of new practices, and when RBPs are introduced in hybrid formats alongside conventional subsidies. Notably, farmers' responses to hybrid schemes are more coherent when paired with an AECS framing than with a voluntary carbon market framing, suggesting that pure market mechanisms create additional psychological barriers. Danish farmers systematically and substantially overestimate the negative economic impacts of the CO₂e tax — by a factor of up to three relative to expert estimates — and this perception gap represents a key driver of policy opposition. Expert information partially reduces these misperceptions and increases tax support, but the effect is heterogeneous: smaller farms and crop producers respond more readily, while larger farms and livestock producers exhibit limited belief revision, consistent with motivated reasoning. The study also finds that opposition to the carbon tax can paradoxically increase openness to an agricultural ETS scheme, pointing to a policy substitution effect with important implications for policy sequencing. Together, these findings highlight that achieving agricultural GHG reductions requires policy designs that account for behavioural realities, including uncertainty aversion, belief biases, and farmer heterogeneity, thereby contributing to VISIONARY's broader objective of identifying how policy design can facilitate sustainability transitions in diverse socio-ecological contexts.

The full report will be available soon.

This report documents findings produced by Task 3.2 “Transition of agri-environmental systems to climate-neutral food systems” within WP3 “Agri-environmental policy experimentation”. The task aims to explore EU farmers’ acceptance of both compulsory measures (such as an agricultural emissions trading scheme) and voluntary carbon markets. It will also examine other economic instruments, including carbon, or CO2e, taxes and innovative subsidy schemes (such as result-based payments (RBPs) and hybrid payments (HPs)), designed to encourage climate-friendly farming practices. In addition, Task 3.2 has the objective to investigate whether and to what extent behavioural factors affect farmers’ acceptability of such economic policy instruments. To address these objectives, two contextualized experiments involving a total of about 1,100 farmers were conducted, one in Italy and the other in Denmark.

Water resource management at the landscape scale is vital for addressing environmental and hydrological challenges in European agriculture. Due to fragmented land ownership, management must extend beyond individual properties and align with hydrological systems, requiring collaborative governance involving farmers and other stakeholders. This study (Milestone 9) on motives and barriers of collective action to reduce the impact on water resources uses Elinor Ostrom’s design principles (DPs) as a diagnostic tool to assess institutional robustness in three cases: irrigation management in Spain and Hungary, and catchment-based nitrogen regulation in Denmark. The Spanish case shows strong alignment with DPs, featuring nested, user-driven organizations and legal recognition of collective rights. The Hungarian case shows strong top-down control, but lacks the capacity to implement complex and collective water management initiatives, as well as the necessary bottom-up cooperation, coordination and professional guidance. The Danish case diverges notably from DPs due to limited stakeholder involvement and user autonomy. These findings demonstrate how institutional context and governance design affect legitimacy and effectiveness in water management. While Ostrom’s principles offer a valuable institutional benchmark, they provide limited insight into behavioral factors influencing farmer participation. We propose that future research on Ostrom’s principles need to incorporate behavioral perspectives to better understand successes and failures of collective agri-environmental schemes for sustainable water resource use. Our follow-up work will move beyond institutional analysis to explore the behavioural levers and barriers in collective agri-environmental programs.

This report (Deliverable 2.2) builds on the initial conceptual and analytical framework of the VISIONARY project and aims to map out how the case studies selected in VISIONARY complement each other to address key objectives for the project. The report aims to briefly outline the theoretical foundations of our work and outline the approach taken in the case studies.

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This Analytical Framework will steer the empirical research of the VISIONARY project, with regards to policy interventions, to novel value chain initiatives and business models, and to leverage points in the agri-food systems. The Analytical Framework adopts a novel approach combining two substantially different approaches: quantitative, experimental and behavioural economics on the one hand, and qualitative, comprehensive systems thinking approaches on the other.

This Initial Conceptual Framework assembles VISIONARY’s theoretical and conceptual foundations, explaining the systemic character of the food system and its transitions towards sustainability, the role of food actors’ behavioural factors in conditioning such transition and the interaction between research and policy-making to accelerate. This initial framework sets the foundations for the ‘Empirically grounded Conceptual Framework’ to be released in the summer of 2025. After a preliminary review of the approaches revolving around food system transition towards sustainability and its behavioural dimension (in particular of farmers and consumers), the document focuses on two main domains: ‘behavioural food policies’ and ‘sustainable business models’. Finally, the document deepens into the transdisciplinary approach of the project, based upon the concept and implementation of Science-Policy Interfaces.