Norms, property and environmental governance in lowland agriculture

• Main Author: Davies, B.
• Published: University of Cambridge 2004
• Subjects: 630
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.598357

This thesis concerns the relationship between norms, property and environmental governance of agriculture. The approach is broadly within the behaviouralist tradition, and addresses the role of what are characterized as stewardship norms in influencing environmental activity in lowland farming. The first half encompasses a theoretical review of models of behaviour, property rights, and value studies in agricultural economics, and develops a theoretical framework establishing the importance of the interrelationship between formal principles of governance and informal normative assumptions regarding implied rights in land and beliefs in the legitimacy of particular governance regimes. In the second half, the results of a farm survey conducted in East Anglia, UK, are reported. The survey utilizes a semi-structured factor analytic method, Q methodology, to identify different perspectives on agricultural stewardship, and combines this with a structured questionnaire which describes the structural and personal characteristics of farmers, some aspects of their environmental management behaviour, and their reactions to a set of proposed policy principles. The results indicate that normative perspectives can be effectively studied using Q methodology, and that some significant relationships can be found with both behaviour and attitudes towards policy. However the nature of the sample, which was non-random, and the small sizes of some attitudinal clusters identified makes much of the analysis suggestive rather than definitive. The rationale for the study can be related to recent work on the boundaries between the old and the New Institutional Economics (NIE) which suggests that the relationship between external institutions and individual motivation is reflexive. In this sense, economic agents take normative cues from the external framing of choices, which lead to the selection of appropriate behaviours in response to framing effects.