The politics of national SDG indicator systems: A comparison of four European countries.

The sustainable development goals (SDGs) constitute an ambitious comprehensive global framework including monitoring mechanisms and indicators to evaluate progress towards precise targets of sustainable development. Most European countries have adapted their national sustainability indicator systems to conform to the UN Agenda 2030 for sustainable development, introducing new indicators and monitoring frameworks and governance processes in which these are embedded. What do we know about the political processes and struggles of implementing this important global framework? How does the politics of indicators differ in national contexts? We propose a classification of national indicator systems along dimensions of indicator selection, appraisal landscape, participatory nature, and political communication. We empirically explore these dimensions for four European national sustainability indicator systems through a comparative analysis based on national policy documents, indicator databases, and web portals as well as inputs from workshops and expert interviews. Given the considerable variation with respect to the trajectory of national sustainability indicator systems, we posit that these differences correspond to different national interpretations of sustainability.

Farmers' preferences for nutrient and climate-related agri-environmental schemes: A cross-country comparison.

We use data from a survey of 2439 farmers in 5 countries around the Baltic Sea (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Poland and Sweden) to investigate their preferences for adopting agricultural practices aimed at reducing nutrient leaching and greenhouse gas emissions. The measures considered are set-aside, catch crops and reduced fertilization. Contracts vary with respect to the area enrolled, contract length, possibility of premature termination, availability of professional advice and compensation. We quantitatively describe farmers' preferences in terms of their willingness-to-accept compensation for specific attributes of these contracts, if implemented. The results vary substantially between farm types (farmers' characteristics) and between the 5 countries, and support differentiation of contract obligations and payments to improve the uptake of Agri-Environmental Schemes. The results can be readily used to improve the design of country-specific nutrient reduction policies, in accordance with the next Common Agricultural Policy.

Are independent agricultural advisors more oriented towards recommending reduced pesticide use than supplier-affiliated advisors?

This paper explores whether agricultural advisors employed by chemical companies or agricultural companies selling pesticides (supplier-affiliated advisors) are more likely to recommend more intensive use of pesticides than advisors employed by companies without an economic interest in selling pesticides (independent advisors). We further test whether potential differences in advice are caused by differences in advisors' perceived demands for advice from farmers, different environmental risk perceptions about pesticide use or different weighing of the purposes of pesticide use. The analysis is based on a survey administered to the whole population of 540 advisors in Denmark; we received 227 valid responses. The main finding is that pesticide advice differs across company type. We find that supplier-affiliated advisors are less likely to recommend lower doses - scoring on average 3.9 on a scale from 1 (never) to 5 (always). Independent advisors employed at Danish Agricultural Advisory Services score an average of 4.3. The difference is statistically significant. The analysis does not offer strong support for the different causal mediators we examined. Advisors across company type tend to weigh different objectives equally; tend to agree on environmental risk perception of using pesticides; and differ only slightly on perceived farmer demand. One possible conclusion, therefore, is that explanation is as simply that differences in economic incentives produce different recommendations between advisory companies. Policy implications of the findings are that the European Union should consider addressing this difference more directly when regulating the use of pesticides in European agriculture through e.g. the Sustainable Use of Pesticides Directive (Directive, 2009/128/EC). More differentiation in the approaches for informing different types of advisors might be needed. Moreover, our results point towards the need for knowledge about whether advisors in other countries than Denmark tend to believe that approved pesticides are innocuous to the environment because such perceptions might hamper initiatives to reduce the doses of approved pesticides.