| dc.description.abstract | The traces of erosion are visible throughout the Spanish province of Andalusia, often carving out beautiful valleys and so providing a beautiful sight for tourists traveling the mountainous landscape. However, soil erosion threatens farmers’ livelihoods, as they see their income decrease throughout the years, and the region watches its tax revenues partially disappear by cleaning local waterways of sediments and excessive nutrients. Andalusia suffers from one of the highest erosion rates throughout the EU, but is also the source of a large portion of agricultural produce grown within the Union. Suggesting policy instruments to address this common resource pool problem with governance solutions is one of the main goals of this thesis. Soil governance is a complex research field however. Instead of reviewing the literature on conservation agriculture governance to identify “effective and efficient” policy instruments, this research starts “further back”. This step ‘back’, to eventually suggest better and more locally relevant policy solutions, entailed researching Andalusian farmers’ motivations to implement or not, or, in other words, drivers and barriers that influence a farmer’s choice to adopt conservation agricultural practices. Many different kinds of these practices are implemented by farmers worldwide, but this research will limit itself to the researching the uptake of 8 anti-erosive Best Management Practices (from here on ‘BMP’s’).
To find these drivers and barriers, a survey was constructed and distributed among farmers in Andalusia and subsequently analyzed, to answer the main research question: “What governance modes lead to a higher implementation rate of Best Management Practices on arable land by farmers in Andalusia, Spain?”.
Preliminary results indicated that the most popular BMP’s among respondents are rotation with cereals, permanent grasslands and conservation tillage. Farmers teaching themselves the skills needed to implement the practices on their farm was found to be the strongest driver, and peer pressure the strongest barrier.
Literature suggests that drivers or barriers to implement Best Management Practices vary across the world, along with the relative importance of one driver or barrier compared to others. This is called “dependence on local context”. Therefore, when choosing effective modes of governance to address this issue of soil governance, it is important to choose a region that has a common socio-economic situation and farmers adhere to the same set of laws and regulations with regards to subsidies. This study found that barriers to implementation of BMP are indeed context dependent, but this could not be validated for the drivers of adoption; these were more ‘universal drivers’, as identified in ‘general’ soil governance literature.
A mix of policy instruments, found in soil governance literature to specifically address certain drivers and barriers were suggested eventually to address the drivers and barriers identified by this research. Regulatory, economic, educational instruments and instruments focused on building social capital are suggested to address the soil erosion problem. Furthermore, it is suggested that policy instruments that complement each other are used, or that their combined effect achieves more than the sum of their parts. Lastly, it was found that a shift to more self- governing modes, with elements of (de)-centralized and interactive modes of soil governance would be most suited for the local context, which answers the main research question. | |
