Pathways for governance opportunities: Social network analysis to create targeted and effective policies for agricultural and environmental development

Participatory techniques are widely recognized as essential in addressing the challenges of agri-environmental policy and decision-making. Furthermore, it is well known that stakeholder analysis and social network analysis are useful methods in the identification of actors that are involved in a system and the connections between them. To identify key stakeholders and improve the transfer of information from national-to farm-level, we compared a stakeholder analysis with farmer-centric networks for primary productivity, carbon regulation and biodiversity through the case study of Latvia. Farmer-centric networks show a higher number of stakeholders communicating on the topic of primary productivity network comparing to other topics. We found three pathways for improving knowledge transfer in agri-environmental governance: horizontal strengthening of farming community, horizontal strengthening of policy departments, and vertical strengthening between policy departments and farmers. The first step is to ensure that policy-makers have a common understanding of the results that should be achieved. The second step is the transfer of know-how between farmers to develop new solutions. The third step is the training of advisers in the land multifunctionality and the strengthening of communication and knowledge transfer between policy departments and farmers in order to jointly achieve the desired direction at that national level. Long-term cooperation between many stakeholders, including knowledge transfer, the development and implementation of solutions, and monitoring are essential in order to adequately address global societal challenges. The application of our mixed methods approach to elucidate pathways for improved governance of knowledge and information is of direct relevance to other jurisdictions seeking to transition towards multifunctional and sustainable land management

Abandoned farmland: Past failures or future opportunities for Europe's Green Deal? A Baltic case-study

Competing societal demands on land require careful land management. In the era of the European Green Deal, farmers are required to meet some of these competing demands, specifically around production, greenhouse gas emission reductions, and biodiversity conservation. At the same time, 15.1% of total EU land is abandoned or underutilised, which means that it contributes neither to food, nor to ecosystem services, to its full potential. Reintegrating abandoned agricultural land back into production is therefore one of the potential pathways to deliver on the aspirations of the Common Agriculture Policy post-2020. In this paper we assess the potential of managing and reintegrating abandoned agricultural land in Europe to simultaneously increase primary productivity, carbon regulation and habitat for biodiversity, using Latvia as a national case-study that is representative of this challenge in a Baltic context. Our results show that for some regions, reintegration of abandoned agricultural land can lead to “triple win” synergies. These opportunities can be further exploited by applying best management practices to these reintegrated lands. In other regions, where the area of abandoned agricultural land is limited because of favourable biophysical conditions for intensive agricultural production, such “triple-win” synergies are scarce. In such areas, abandoned land plays a role in maintaining ecosystem services at local and regional scales, and even small increases in primary productivity come at the expense of biodiversity. This calls for careful management that involves diverse actor groups, including land managers, in the decision-making process, and in priority setting in each of the regions