What Policy Tools Can Support Farmer Clusters and Biodiversity-Sensitive Farming?
- Taskscape Associates
- Jul 4, 2025
- 2 min read
A new collection of policy briefs and practice abstracts from the FRAMEwork project sets out evidence-based recommendations on incentives, farmer engagement, and practical tools for cluster development.
The FRAMEwork project has published a new report, Summary information notes and policy briefs, which brings together five outputs from the project's work on farmer behaviour and incentives (Work Package 6). The collection is aimed at policymakers, farm advisors, facilitators, and researchers interested in how incentive structures and social learning can support the transition to biodiversity-sensitive farming at landscape scale.
Who will Find it Useful?
Policymakers working on CAP reform and agri-environment scheme design will find direct recommendations on how to incorporate collective approaches, result-based payments, and facilitation into scheme structures. Facilitators and farm advisors will benefit from the practice abstracts, which offer reflective tools for assessing cluster maturity and engaging farmers through gamified learning. Researchers studying farmer behaviour, incentive design, or collaborative conservation will find the underlying evidence and references to the full policy briefs and academic papers.
What Does it Contain?
The report includes three policy briefs, each with targeted recommendations for EU and national policy design. The first, on private incentives, examines how farmer clusters can increase participation in agri-environment schemes, drawing on evidence from the UK, France, and the Netherlands (read our related blog).
The second, on public incentives, presents experimental evidence from Germany on whether result-based payments work better when applied to groups of farmers rather than individuals (read our blogs on the research behind this brief and its findings). The third, on engaging farmers in a Farmer Cluster, draws on qualitative research across six European regions to show how social learning and facilitation transform farmers' identities and strengthen their engagement with biodiversity goals (read our related blog).
Alongside the policy briefs, the report includes two practice abstracts. One sets out five formative dimensions: governance, leadership, facilitation, group characteristics, and context — which facilitators and advisors can use to reflect on a cluster's development and direction. The other describes the DigiFarm Game, a set of digital games co-developed with cluster facilitators in Scotland, Austria, and the Czech Republic to identify knowledge gaps among farmers and encourage focused learning about on-farm biodiversity management.
Where Can I Read It?
The full report is available as a free download from Zenodo. Each of the three policy briefs can also be accessed individually: private incentives, public incentives, and engaging farmers.