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Farmers' social embeddedness has historically been investigated through agri-industrial modernisation or by post-productivistic rural development. In this paper, we investigate farmers' social embeddedness in five case areas characterised by different types of short food supply chains and contribute with a nuanced perspective on factors influencing different types of social embeddedness. We collect data of the self-reported assessment of farmers' contribution to the activities in the local community using a questionnaire among landowners in rural areas, and the data are analysed using a logistic regression model. We find that farmers’ social embeddedness depends on individual farm characteristics in the terms that small and part-time farmers show less social embeddedness than fulltime farmers, and we find an effect from the different case areas. Last, we suggest broadening the social embeddedness into three components: community embeddedness, responsibility embeddedness and the traditional production embeddedness.

Policies aiming at improving biodiversity often consist of costly agri-environmental schemes, i.e. subsidized grazing or mowing of semi-natural areas. However, these practices have widely been found to be insufficient to mitigate biodiversity loss. Rewilding, i.e. restoring natural processes in self-sustaining biodiverse ecosystems, has been proposed as an alternative and is hypothesized to be a more cost-efficient approach to promote biodiversity conservation. Rewilding requires the availability of large natural areas which are not allocated for farming, forestry, and infrastructure to avoid potential conflicts over the use of the area. We perform an ex-ante private cost–benefit analysis of the establishment of four large nature reserves for rewilding in Denmark. We analyse the economic effects of changing from summer grazing in nature areas in combination with cultivated fields and forestry to the establishment of nature reserves in four case areas. We consider two scenarios involving conversion of agriculture and forestry areas into natural areas in combination with either extensive year-round cattle grazing or rewilding with wild large herbivores. In two case areas, it appears possible to establish large nature areas without incurring extra costs. Additionally, rewilding further reduces costs compared to year-round cattle grazing. Two opposing effects were dominant: increased economic rent occurred from the shift from summer grazing to year-round grazing or rewilding, while cessation of agriculture and forestry caused opportunity costs.

Global biodiversity is under pressure from human activities, and the effort for nature conservation and restoration and the allocation of economic resources for biodiversity policies remain insufficient. In such a context, volunteers can play an important role as a resource in nature conservation projects if their recreational activities interact with the objectives of nature management. In recent years, the number of volunteers in conservation work has increased in Denmark, with more people volunteering to contribute to nature conservation projects. Ensuring that volunteers remain motivated and engaged is crucial for the success of such conservation projects. In this study, we evaluated the motivation among members of grazing organizations, an activity that represents the most prominent voluntary nature conservation initiative in Denmark. We applied an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and an ordinal regression to analyze survey data from 25 Danish grazing organizations. We found that five motivational factors determine the engagement of the volunteers, namely social, nature value, instrumental, identification, and personal benefit. Whereas the social, nature value and personal benefit are factors also identified in the existing literature, the instrumental and identification factors add new perspectives to the motivation of environmental volunteers. We found that place attachment is an important driver, and that the chairpersons/coordinators of the grazing organizations especially emphasized the sharing of values and knowledge with their members as a driver. Lastly, volunteers were reluctant to support the idea of forming a more formal setup in terms of a “grazing organization union”.

This article explores the potential of the SDG framework for interdisciplinary research. The aim is to illustrate the process of creating a shared platform of operation by the clarifying the positive and negative interactions between societal demands for land use on a national and local level. The research question is answered by making use of the systemic approach introduced by Niklas Luhmann including his arguments about autopoietic communication systems reproducing themselves. An interdisciplinary research group is firstly applying the SDG framework to the demands for sustainable land use by activating the land consolidation in Denmark. By doing so a ‘national framework’ anchored in the SDG framework is created. Secondly, the national framework is applied to a multifunctional land consolidation project in a Danish case area. The findings from the mapping of interactions between societal demands on a concrete case area revealed that some indicators and societal demands are more prone to conflicts than others but also on the local level there may be variations. Thus, a localised and contextualised SDG framework has shown useful insight for future projects on sustainable land use including land consolidation projects. The paper concludes that the SDG framework may be used for facilitating interdisciplinary research, however there is also a need for guidelines and examples on how to integrate the framework in academia. The paper offers a suggestion for integrating the Agenda2030 and the SDG framework in projects about sustainable land use.