Abstract The European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has failed to achieve its aim of preserving European farmland biodiversity, despite massive investment in subsidies to incentivise environmentally-beneficial farming practices. This failure calls into question the design of the subsidy schemes, which are intended to either function as a safety net and make farming profitable or compensate farmers for costs and loss of income while undertaking environmental management. In this study, we assess whether the design of environmental payments in the CAP reflects current knowledge about farmers’ decision-making as found in the research literature. We do so on the basis of a comprehensive literature review on farmers’ uptake of agri-environmental management practices over the past 10 years and interviews specifically focused on Ecological Focus Areas with policy-makers, advisors and farmers in seven European countries. We find that economic and structural factors are the most commonly-identified determinants of farmers’ adoption of environmental management practices in the literature and in interviews. However, the literature suggests that these are complemented by – and partially dependent on – a broad range of social, attitudinal and other contextual factors that are not recognised in interview responses or, potentially, in policy design. The relatively simplistic conceptualisation of farmer behaviour that underlies some aspects of policy design may hamper the effectiveness of environmental payments in the CAP by over-emphasising economic considerations, potentially corroding farmer attitudes to policy and environmental objectives. We conclude that an urgent redesign of agricultural subsidies is needed to better align them with the economic, social and environmental factors affecting farmer decision-making in a complex production climate, and therefore to maximise potential environmental benefits.

中文翻译：

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对农民动机的简单理解可能会破坏共同农业政策的环境潜力

摘要 欧盟共同农业政策 (CAP) 未能实现其保护欧洲农田生物多样性的目标，尽管对补贴进行了大量投资以激励对环境有益的农业实践。这一失败使人们对补贴计划的设计提出了质疑，补贴计划的目的是作为一个安全网，使农业有利可图，或者在进行环境管理的同时补偿农民的成本和收入损失。在这项研究中，我们评估了 CAP 中环境支付的设计是否反映了研究文献中关于农民决策的当前知识。我们这样做的基础是对过去 10 年农民采用农业环境管理实践的全面文献回顾以及与七个欧洲国家的政策制定者、顾问和农民专门针对生态重点领域的访谈。我们发现经济和结构性因素是文献和访谈中农民采用环境管理实践的最常见的决定因素。然而，文献表明，这些是由广泛的社会、态度和其他背景因素补充的——并且部分依赖于——面试答复或政策设计中没有认识到的。作为政策设计某些方面基础的对农民行为的相对简单化的概念化可能会通过过分强调经济考虑来阻碍 CAP 中环境支付的有效性，这可能会腐蚀农民对政策和环境目标的态度。我们的结论是，需要紧急重新设计农业补贴，以便在复杂的生产环境中更好地将其与影响农民决策的经济、社会和环境因素结合起来，从而最大限度地提高潜在的环境效益。