Farmers as empowered intermediaries in natural capital markets

Natural capital markets offer new income opportunities for farmers, including payments for carbon sequestration, water quality, biodiversity, soil health, and farm diversification. Farmers can generate revenue by selling environmental value and providing access to their facilities. To support farmers, providing information and empowering them to navigate nature-based and climate financial incentives is crucial.

This project explores a cooperative governance model where farmers are organized to represent their members to buyers of natural capital products. The cooperative acts as a one-stop shop, facilitating negotiations and ensuring equitable transitions for farmers to secure fair prices for the benefits derived from their land management practices. The project assesses the effectiveness of this model in meeting farmers’ needs and explores its scalability to promote just transitions for farmers in negotiating nature-based benefits.

Project lead: Amy Burnett, Middlesex University London

Project members: The Environmental Farmers Group (EFG), Wiltshire; Fergus Lyon, Middlesex University London

Findings

• Commercial logics at times compete with mutual principles. There is a tension between neo-liberalism and cooperatives.
• Perverse incentives of local authorities to compete with mutual governance
• Complexity can affect cohesion and the ability to streamline active engagement.
• Communications need to be tailored to actual farm practices and behaviours.
• Cognitive dissonance and long-term horizon decision-making can affect enrolment to nature markets, some of which are beyond a farmer’s working lifetime.

Suggestions for further research

Future research could examine the intersection of natural capital markets and the cognitive dissonance of long-term horizon decision-making, which affects whether farmers seek to decide to opt in (or not) to long-horizon agreements. The role of cooperatives and their scalability to interface with other market forces is of high interest and potential impact.