The prospects of innovative agri-environmental contracts in the European policy context: Results from a Delphi study

Innovative agri-environmental contracts are increasingly studied in the literature, but their adoption has been relatively slow and geographically scattered. Action-based agri-environmental measures remain the predominant policy mechanism across Europe. A three-round Policy Delphi study was conducted with policy makers, scientific experts, farmers’ representatives, and NGOs from across 15 different European countries, to investigate how and under which circumstances novel contractual solutions could be implemented more widely. The expert panel perceived result-based and collective contractual elements as the most promising. Although considered beneficial from several aspects, value chain contracts were perceived less relevant to the policy environment. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Pillar 2 measures were highlighted by the experts as the key policy area to implement novel contracts by national or regional authorities, but Pillar 1 eco-schemes, being launched in the CAP 2023–2027, were also considered as a potentially suitable framework for testing and implementation. The Delphi panel envisaged innovative contracts should be adopted by governments in iterative steps and not as a complete substitute for current payment schemes, but rather as an additional incentive to them. Such an incremental approach allows contractual innovations to capitalise on existing best practices. But it also implies the risk that innovative contracts could remain marginal and fail to substantially change farmers’ behaviour, resulting in a failure to improve environmental conditions

Comfort-Oriented Metamorphic House (COMETAE)

Publications Internes de l'IRISA ISSN : 2102-6327This proposal aims at challenging the existing design paradigm of residential building architecture with insights from pervasive computing, robotics, human-computer interaction and cognitive ergonomics. ICT and architecture will be holistically integrated in order to realize a radical advancement leading to metamorphic houses. Supported by ICT, domestic environments will self-adapt to the ongoing activities of inhabitants, to increase the comfort of living and optimize the use of space and energy. The same physical space will be transformed for diff erent uses, giving inhabitants the illusion of living in a bigger, more adapted and more comfortable place. The traditional tradeoff between comfort and energy conservation will also be revisited, thanks to an optimal exploitation of natural light, heat and ventilation. The realization of the targeted breakthrough will be achieved through cross-fertilization between involved disciplines and by the support of a panel of final users, architects and building engineers in the design, development and evaluation phases. COMETAE will introduce a novel approach to smart spaces research, where the space is itself an actuator of the system. Indoor environment, space and energy use will be optimized with respect to environmental factors, occupants' activities and life cycle, by orchestrating adaptive robotic building components, while ensuring occupants' safety. New coupling between inhabitants and their environment will be enabled by combining human-computer interaction and space recon guration, considering beauty of interaction and multi-user scenarios. This proposal opens the way towards a radically new use of ICT, needed to address future limitations of space and energy in the domestic environment, imposed by the ongoing and future evolutions of technology, environmental questions and socio-demographic factors