The art of blue-green alliances: Co-creating sustainable agricultural landscapes

Over the past years, North Western European agriculture was hit hard by re-occurring summer droughts, thus questioning the sustainability of our agricultural landscapes. During drought events, policy making concentrates on reactive measures, such as the ban of water extraction by farmers. Yet there is also a need for developing pro-active measures including the development of climate-proof agricultural landscapes. The latter comprises the creation of blue-green infrastructure in agricultural areas such as, for example, the construction of infiltration ponds and the restauration of depressional wetlands. Operating at the landscape level entails that individuals and organisations living and working in the area should form local alliances to plan, co-create, implement and manage blue-green infrastructure. In rural areas, these alliances comprise farmers, land owners, water managers, nature conservationists, residents and policy makers. In Flanders, many local alliances were formed over the past 5 years, each of them aiming to develop climate-proof agricultural landscapes by creating a blue-green infrastructure. These alliances are supported by multiple governmental programs and initiatives set-up in order to incentivize the development of blue-green infrastructures in Flanders’ agricultural landscape. In this presentation, we show the obstacles and the opportunities in the operationalization of blue-green infrastructure, focusing on the role of local alliances. In particular, we investigate farmers’ inclusion in the local alliances since they are the principal land users of the agricultural area, they own a lot of land and have tacit knowledge of the local area. To that end, we review local reports and studies, conduct interviews with key stakeholders from the local alliances and facilitate the set-up of a community of practice (CoP) of the local alliances to better understand what kind of knowledge and skills they have and exchange. In addition, we study how the design and the co-creation of the blue-green infrastructure is organized within a local alliance.We conclude that setting up social learning between local alliances that are responsible for the implementation is extremely important in order to incentivize the development of blue-green infrastructure. Therefore, our results suggest that policy making must support social learning just as much as technical knowledge building in order to promote pathways to sustainable agriculture such as the development of blue-green infrastructure . Because social learning is a lengthy and fickle process, we advise policy makers to support the social learning in a structural way rather than through temporary, sporadic governmental programs. Furthermore, we highlight that alliance building must start from the social dynamics already present in the area, and thus the co-creation of a blue-green infrastructure is inherently tailor-made and likewise requires tailor-made incentives.