Public participation for a greener Europe: The potential of farmers in biodiversity monitoring

This article considers the potential of including farmers in the governance, organization and execution of biodiversity monitoring. More specifically, we consider the opportunities for farmer involvement in biodiversity data collection through an explorative empirical analysis of the governance of biodiversity monitoring activities in agricultural landscapes within the Netherlands. We identify practical obstacles to farmer participation, assess the role of environmental NGOs in this process, and consider the extent to which this data leads to increasingly adaptive land management decisions to promote biodiversity. The governance of agri-environmental subsidy contracts with farmer collectives in the Netherlands, we conclude, could be used as an important vehicle to incentivize both biodiversity data collection and science-based land management decisions.