Farmers and land managers play a key role in the environmental and economic sustainability of the farming sector in Europe. The way they organise and network, and their ability to combine individual and collective work, both mutually reinforcing, will critically influence the future of Europe’s foods and landscapes.
The aim of this project was to reach higher levels of organisation and networking, and develop a healthier, and more productive and harmonious farming sector in Europe for the long term.
Within this perspective, BOND’s general objective was to help unleash, strengthen, and organise, the great potential for collective action and networking of individuals, groups and entities of farmers and land managers in selected countries across Europe, with a view to creating strong, dynamic and effective organisations that have a voice and a place in policy design. Through the benefits of working with others, extending interactions with multiple actors, the project fostered human well-being, the management of landscapes, agricultural growth and a vigorous social capital throughout Europe.
SO.1 Draw up solutions and build bonding capital within farmer and land manager groups, ensuring cohesiveness and trust among people.
BOND drew up solutions from case studies and success stories across Europe, to provide learnings, inspire, motivate and guide individuals, groups and entities of farmers and land managers who engage in collective action in the farming sector. BOND provided a range of concrete solutions, and capacity building tools, to develop the initial steps of building effective organisations, with special emphasis on developing cohesiveness within the groups.
SO.2 Enable different organisations to come closer together, building bridging capital to form larger networks (value chains, cooperatives, apex bodies), understanding attitudes, weaknesses and constraints that impede collective action.
BOND identified the attitudes, constraints and disincentives that influence the development of collective action in the farming sector in Europe, through its methodology, co-developed between end-users and academia, applied by the different groups across Europe. The outcome informed the development of tools and methods that best respond to the needs and aspirations of end-users. The different constituencies worked together in a series of national workshops, following a multi-actor approach, tackling the issues through different angles with different perspectives, thus bringing new ideas with the resolving power of finding innovative solutions that are adapted to the myriad of local contexts. BOND offered capacity building modules to bridge peer entities to reach higher levels of aggregation.
SO.3 Build linking capital, developing ties with entities with different interests and powers, including government, donors, academia, private sector, to reach a stronger position in decision-making.
BOND designed a gaming interface to help overcome the barriers and power imbalance between farmers and powerful actors such as policy-makers. This new interface enabled farmers and land managers to take a firmer position in the decision-making arena, while at the same time helping policy makers better grasp field realities. This bridging process allowed different constituencies to explore innovative ways of talking to each other, on equal grounds, thus developing linking capital, with increased recognition, respect and willingness to collaborate on common challenges.
SO.4 Engage multi actors and policy makers.
BOND designed and deployed an Engagement and Dissemination strategy that mobilised the knowledge and capacity co-developed throughout the project, in an incremental participatory process with an increasing number of groups and entities to maximise impact within and beyond the project’s lifespan.
Through these specific objectives, BOND’s legacy is to offer, to the farmers and land managers across Europe, for the medium and long term: a set of practical processes, methods and tools (with training modules), easily accessible and user-friendly, to build capacity in bonding (within), bridging (between) and linking (beyond) capital, for the creation of dynamic, strong and effective collective organisations. A specific gaming technique was designed to engage with policy-makers.
With these tools at hand, any individual, entity or group in the farming and land managing sectors at large, has the possibility to access a menu a la carte, with tested recipes from practice partners, (including video testimonies) throughout Europe, to guide them and accompany them in incremental steps, when they decide to engage and benefit from the synergies of working with others in the farming and land sectors.
