Wageningen University (WUR) - Netherlands

How can agriculture contribute to more biodiversity, a beautiful landscape and a healthy environment?

This question is the backbone of my research. Sometimes I look at collaboration at the regional or local level from a spatial planning and governance perspective. Other times I work with farmers to better understand farmer behaviour and farming systems. Or I try to understand the larger societal changes that are required to enable farmers to restore biodiversity. Maybe my field of research can best be summarized as transformative landscape governance. My favorite research projects are inter- and transdisciplinary, because that involves making sense of very complex issues together, while remaining grounded in the reality of stakeholders.

I have been involved in several European research projects in relation to farming and biodiversity, peri-urban planning and transformative change. In the Netherlands, I have studied collective agri-environmental management and nature-inclusive farming. For example, I led the long-term transdisciplinary monitoring of the Farming for Nature pilots (4 farms), and currently I lead the long-term interdisciplinary monitoring of 16 nature-inclusive farms that collaborate with the State Forest Service.

I am increasingly convinced that add-on measures to conventional farming systems will not restore biodiversity in agricultural landscapes in Europe. What is needed, is an agroecological transformation. This would require profound shifts not only in farming practices, but also in skills, views of good farming, value chains, food cultures, consumer behaviour, education and governance; questioning current human-nature relations, individualism, and distribution of power.