Strategies to increase participation in agri-environmental programmes: the role of social capital

The voluntary nature of agri-environmental programmes makes their success contingent on the adoption decision by farmers. This is a complex decision which cannot be explained in terms of a single construct. This paper extends the modelling of the selection of the best farm management option in the presence of agri-environmental programmes to consider explicitly the role of social capital, investigating both its structural and cognitive dimensions. The results support the idea that technical aspects alone are not sufficient to explain how best farm management plans are selected and suggest that social capital influences this decision both for low and high change requirement measures.