About BOND

Farmers and land managers play a key role in the environmental and economic sustainability of the farming sector in Europe. The way they organize 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 is to reach higher levels of organization 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 is to directly contribute to unleash, strengthen, and organize, 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 organizations that have a voice and a place in policy design. Through the benefits of working with others, extending interactions with multiple actors, the project will help foster 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 will draw 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 will provide a range of concrete solutions, and capacity building tools, to develop the initial steps of building effective organizations, with special emphasis on developing cohesiveness within the groups.

SO.2 Enable different organizations 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 will identify 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 will inform the development of tools and methods that best respond to the needs and aspirations of end-users. The different constituencies will work 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 will offer 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 will design a gaming interface to help overcome the barriers and power imbalance between farmers and powerful actors such as policy-makers. This new interface will help farmers and land managers take a firmer position in the decision-making arena, while at the same time helping policy makers better grasp field realities. This bridging process between two different constituencies will allow 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.

Design and deploy an Engagement and Dissemination strategy that mobilizes the knowledge and capacity co-developed throughout the project, in an incremental participatory process with an increasing number of groups and entities to maximize impact within and beyond the project’s lifespan.

Through these specific objectives, BOND’s legacy will be 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 organizations. A specific gaming technique will be 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, will have 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.