Stronger Together?! A Social Network Perspective on Adapting Collective Agri-Environmental Schemes in Germany

Collective approaches to agri-environmental and climate schemes (cAECS) are being piloted across Germany as an alternative to conventional AECS. These approaches are explored under varying context conditions and differ in institutional design. This study assesses the viability of cAECS across different contexts by examining governance networks and analyzing different institutional designs. We integrate Social Network Analysis (SNA) with the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework and apply it to three early-implementation cAECS cases in Germany. Data was collected via the Net-Map method, on cases selected for their diverse biophysical conditions (ecosystems and farming systems), community attributes (farm sizes and social structures), and rules-in-use (funding sources and contract types).
Our results show that contextual differences influenced the viability of cAECS by shaping governance networks and institutional designs. While local LCAs in coordinating roles, along with farmers and government actors at multiple levels, emerged as key players shaping each governance network, their interrelations and connections to additional actors are context dependent. Further, all cAECS cases relied on core collective elements shaping institutional design (a coordinating actor and spatial targeting), while additional context-specific elements were variably adopted, suggesting a core-periphery institutional structure. Context conditions and their influence on the adoption of collective elements affect the ecological, economic and social viability of cAECS. Despite these variations, interviewees generally recognized the potential benefits of cAECS, though the degree of perceived advantage differed across cases.
The detailed file selection of all three federal states can be found in the download (zip.file).