Incentivising public goods delivery in the UK through the lens of Theories of Practice and Theory of Capital

Abstract

Agri‐environmental policies in England stand on the threshold of significant change, with a new suite of Environmental Land Management schemes set to embody more of the ‘public money for public goods’ principle. In addition, two tranches of these schemes appear heading towards a more collaborative approch towards delivering these public goods—suggesting that landholder collaborations would be a vital key to achieving this goal on such a scale. Running in parallel with this policy change is a countryside that has been undergoing a transition over the past several decades. This has seen a growing diversification in landholder types ‐ prompting a re‐examination not only with regards to the range of landholders who should be recruited into public goods delivery but the incentivisation strategies needed to recruit them as well. In this article, we examine the limitations of the behavioural approach utilised by past agri‐environmental schemes to incentivise farmer uptake. We then propose the use of a Theories of Practice and Theory of Capital framework that shifts the approach towards a more targeted pattern of incentivisation, one which enables the recruitment of a much broader set of public goods providers into landholder collaboration. To demonstrate how this framework can be applied, we present a case study around a range of collaboration models. Our findings suggest that in order for collaborations to be sustained in the long term, policymakers will need to think more directly with regard to the different aspects of collaboration that different landholders place value in. This would ensure opportunities for various forms of capital to be generated or for the recrafting of practices through intervention points. We conclude that the recrafting of the collaborative conservation practice not only can be accomplished through its constituent elements but by changing its practitioners as well—as exemplified by the different configurations of landholders that make up each of our five models of collaboration.