Actor motivations to engage with collaborative agri-environmental policy: An assemblage based exploration

Governments around the world are seeking to achieve socially just transitions to environmentally sustainable modes of agricultural production. Policy makers have increasingly sought to engage an array of societal actors in the collaborative design and implementation of associated policies, which we refer to as Agri-Environmental Policy (AEP) initiatives. Yet, the existing literature includes little context specific exploration of the motivations of those who engage with such initiatives. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the motivations of a small group of actors who established and coordinated a collaborative group to apply to one AEP initiative in Ireland – the European Innovation Partnership for Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability (EIP-AGRI). This group included three farmers, an agri-environmental policy advocate, and a research scientist. Drawing on assemblage literature, we illustrate how each of these actors' motivations emerged 1) based on the specific relationships in which they operated and 2) based on their imagining of potential future scenarios, which they sought to actualise through EIP-AGRI. This paper thus provides a qualitative account of how motivations emerge as different actors creatively navigate complex sets of relationships. We illustrate the utility of an assemblage approach to explore such motivations in ways that account for specific contexts and the capacity of each actor to engage with possible futures. We conclude that the capacity of collaborative approaches to AEP to appeal to actors from different backgrounds relies heavily on such actors’ ability to envisage and anticipate new possibilities. This line of exploration helps us to better understand the extent to which collaborative AEP may align the multiple goals associated with transitioning to environmentally sustainable and socially just food production systems.