IMAGES - Objectives
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Objectives

General objective

The general objective of the project is to provide new directions for improving the definition and implementation of agri-environmental policies. The study is focused on the main current agri-environment policies and their ecological and socio-economical impacts. The cognitive processes of the actors involved (farmers, land owners, institutions) is modelled and implemented in computer simulations. These simulations aim at providing a new understanding of the diffusion of environmentally friendly behaviour and will be used to study the impact of potential changes in policy definition. 

Economic or biophysical models begin to be more and more commonly used tools for the analysis or the design of policies. This interest can easily be understood. Reliable models offer the possibility to experiment future scenarios of action, or to test hypothetical changes in the past, which help to understand what happened. They may be able to answer a large variety of questions (aggregate results, non aggregate results, focus on some variables, propose various statistics on results…).

The development of more complex policies (including optional aspects) and the increased need to take into account social as well as economic impacts of policies, lead the policy makers to be interested by a new type of models : social models in which elaborated representation of agent behaviours is available.

The agri-environmental measures (AEM) are examples of policies in which understanding the behaviour of farmers is important : farmers are free to choose to adopt them or not. A simple economic calculation is not the only criterion explaining farmers behaviour in the case of AEM adoption. Being paid by public finances for biodiversity protection or landscape maintenance is a new situation for farmers. This new behaviour may imply a change of perspective, a different view of the job of farming, which needs time. One can therefore expect the influence of other farmers and of more or less institutionalised contacts to play a part in farmers decision process. Therefore, models for the analysis or the design of such policies must integrate farmer behaviour as an explicit part, including his interactions with other farmers and institutions.

The objective of the IMAGES project is to elaborate such a model and to test it on a variety of study zones in Europe. The aim of the model is to bring a better understanding of the adoption diffusion in these study zones, and if possible to extract more general results that could be useful for the design of future AEMs.

Last updated : 04/02/02. Page maintainer : Clarisse Mantonnier (CEMAGREF - LISC)