Enhancing institutional fit without formal institutional change: farmer-practitioner relationships and agricultural conservation programs in the Chesapeake Bay, USA

Le résumé fourni par la source

Restoring agricultural watersheds often involves incentivizing private landowners to adopt conservation practices that have high public benefits but low or uncertain private benefits for farmers. In the United States, public and private institutions provide overlapping incentives to adopt conservation practices and most funding is governed by complex rules for eligibility and reimbursement. The burden on landowners of navigating such institutional complexity is often cited as a key barrier to their adoption of conservation practices. These barriers contribute to institutional misfit, or the misalignment of program designs and farmers’ expectations of them. The rate of conservation practice adoption in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (CBW) is higher than the national average, and can provide insights into overcoming institutional misfit. Previous research with conservation practitioners (CPs) in the CBW suggested that much of their engagement with farmers centered on improving institutional fit. To better explore the role of CPs in enhancing institutional fit, we interviewed over 130 farmers in the CBW, representing diverse farm sizes and both direct-to-market and commodity producers, about their perceptions of, and experiences with, incentive programs. Using qualitative text analysis, we suggest that farmers’ key programmatic concerns center on the application and funding process and the impact of programs on farm operation. Further, we argue that farmers evaluated the effectiveness of CPs based on their ability to share knowledge, understand the farmers’ vision, and be professional. These expectations of CPs have statistically significant explanatory power in describing farmers’ overall satisfaction with CPs. We also found preliminary evidence of a positive correlation between the number of conservation practices adopted by farmers and whether they met with, and were satisfied with the work of, CPs. Together these results suggest that, along with difficult and time-intensive redesigns of formal agricultural conservation assistance programs, the institutional fit of such programs can be enhanced via the relationships between CPs and farmers and the extent to which the former meets the latter’s expectations. Additionally, CPs could further improve their work and possibly achieve more conservation adoption by learning more about the practicalities of farming, taking the time to understand farmers’ visions for their land, and being professional.

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