Incentivizing a regime change in Dutch agriculture

Abstract

Regime changes are hard to incentivize as behaviour is difficult to change. As efforts towards environmentally sustainable agricultural practices indicate, farmers are reluctant to adopt new practices. This study analyses whether policy packages of mixed public and private payments could be effective in incentivizing a regime change, and how targeting payments could further enhance this effect. We implemented a choice experiment among a large sample of Dutch crop (N = 296) and dairy (N = 514) farmers. Our results highlight the importance of offering policy packages of mixed incentives to stimulate farmers to adopt nature-inclusive farming practices. The combination of incentives is more effective than individual incentives alone, and targeting policies to sectors and farmers greatly enhances effectiveness: mainstream farmers require higher incentives to change their practices than farmers that already made changes on their land. This also highlights the importance of including non-financial elements in policy design for targeting especially mainstream farmers.