Making results‐based payments work across Europe: Balancing trust, monitoring and farmer acceptability

Paying for the results of agri-environmental measures, rather than paying for prescribed management practices (action-based), has become an attractive design option to enhance scheme effectiveness and uptake by farmers. There is a wide range of approaches to integrating results-based elements, with so-called hybrid options featuring base payments or action-based payments, to ensure they work within the respective institutional settings and environmental context of different countries, facilitating upscaling. To assist decision makers, this article presents experiences from Ireland, England and Flanders (Belgium). In the Irish example, results-based elements have been combined with financial support for specific ‘action-based’ interventions (one-off capital investments termed supporting actions) to improve the assessment score to achieve better results-based payments in future. In England, the main results-based scheme was supplemented by a minimum management contract, following farmer feedback, to alleviate the risk of no payment. In Flanders, the results-based version of a grassland pilot has now been integrated into the national scheme and is seeing higher rates of uptake than the purely action-based measures. Scorecard design is crucial, as it determines the complexity of monitoring and reporting in contract design, while payment levels determine the strength of the incentives for farmer’s management decisions and mitigating risk perception.