Typologies of European farmers: approaches, methods and research gaps

Understanding farmers’ behaviour and their different responses to environmental change, institutional change and policy interventions is important to facilitate the understanding of the drivers of environmental degradation. Identification of behavioural types can be very useful in informing the design of targeted instruments to support transformation towards sustainable agriculture and facilitating the transferability of findings between contexts, while also pointing out limits to the generalization of behavioural patterns detected in individual studies. However, typologies of European farmers are quite scattered geographically, among contexts and disciplines. Here, we present results from a literature review of empirically derived European farmer typologies from 36 academic studies. We investigate the underlying methodologies for determining the types, the purposes of developing typologies and whether there are recurring farmer types across contexts and locations. Our results show that (i) the field is quite diverse in terms of purposes, methods and variables used to develop typologies; (ii) there is surprisingly little awareness of the broader literature; (iii) while there are recurring types, they are still diverse and difficult to compare across studies. We recommend a stronger embedding of new typologies in the existing literature and improvements in the transparency of reporting of methods and data to increase the potential for comparison, transferability and generalizability of findings. Also, we derive implications for future research and for policy, e.g. regarding the trade-off between the specificity of types and complexity-related transaction costs (due to tailoring them to different farmer types) and legitimacy issues.