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The dramatic decline in the presence of farmland birds during recent decades has provoked much attention in agri-environmental policy and ecological research. However, the still limited understanding of the socio-economical mechanisms that govern the decline in bird presence hampers the formulation of effective adjustments in land-use and farming practices that could support the return of birds to farmland, i.e. the required fine-tuning of management practices. As a consequence, the existing agri-environmental schemes that offer financial compensation to farmers for implementing generally simple and rather crude measures to stimulate the presence of birds have been limited in their effectiveness and subject to much debate. The objective of this paper is to provide a sociological appraisal of farmers’ experiences with meadow bird protection in a mainly dairy farming area in the Netherlands. The methodology combined visual map analysis, surveys, interviews with farmers and experts, and monitoring farmers’ discussions. The results allowed an assessment of (i) farmers’ views on historical changes in bird numbers in the area and the current distribution of bird nests, (ii) locally adjusted, fine-tuned management practices that were considered to be promising for protecting bird nests, (iii) the importance of farm management with ‘an eye for birds’, i.e. farmers and/or birdwatchers paying additional attention to the presence of nests and chicks before carrying out farming activities, and (iv) the views of key experts in the socio-institutional network in the case study area. The paper concludes that there are various promising options for fine-tuning farm management so it offers better bird protection, but it is expected that such measures will predominantly be adopted on less intensively managed farms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent investigations have indicated that environmental and conservation policies frequently fail to reach anticipated aims, which raises concern over the cost-effectiveness of governmental policy-related expenditure. The limited effectiveness of policies is often attributed to methodological aspects of policy implementation. However, an alternative reason can be the limited internalization of policies, so that these are only implemented to a minimum level to attain benefits or avoid penalties. It is postulated that increased internalization of policies can considerably improve their effectiveness and that suitable institutional arrangements exist to support such increases in internalization. In this paper, we review the available literature on internalization and its institutional aspects, and propose a framework, based on self-determination theory, for evaluation of potential internalization by farm managers that are expected to implement policies. This method was applied to a small case study for dairy farmers in the nationally important landscape of the Northern Friesian Woodlands, The Netherlands. The results showed that organic farmers were internally motivated for nature conservation and had strong institutional links. They were more likely to internalize the goals of environmental policy schemes than conventional farmers who focused predominantly on financial rewards. We suggest that policy developers promote internalization of policies by tuning policy instruments to the specificities of farmers'' motivations to preserve farmers'' nature and to focus on institutional support to help internalization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]