A recently developed by the BESTMAP team research article has been published in Regional Environmental Change journal. The paper is developed by the project partners Dr. Bartosz Bartkowski, Charlotte Schüßler and Birgit Müller from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), Germany.

Understanding farmers’ behaviour and their different responses to environmental change, institutional change and policy interventions is important to facilitate the understanding of the drivers of environmental degradation. Therein, the authors did investigate the underlying methodologies for determining the types, the purposes of developing typologies and whether there are recurring farmer types across contexts and locations. The presented discussions and conclusion result from a literature review of empirically derived European farmer typologies from 36 academic studies.

The article argues that the field of interest is quite diverse in terms of purposes, methods and variables used to develop typologies and there is surprisingly little awareness of the broader literature. Henceforth, the BESTMAP members, recommend a stronger embedding of new typologies in the existing literature and improvements in the transparency of reporting of methods and data to increase the potential for comparison, transferability of findings. Suggestions for future research and for policy and legitimacy issues, are also showcased in the article.

You can read the full paper here.

The publication is also linked to the BESTMAP Open-Access research collection in the RIO journal, where you can find other project-derived material.