Samenvatting

Agri-environmental schemes serve to financially compensate farmers for promoting the quality of nature and landscapes on their land. In 2016, the Netherlands implemented a new scheme that is unique in an EU and even global context. Within this model, rule-setting, inspection and enforcement tasks are shared between public actors and private ‘environmental cooperatives’: groups of farmers legally organized as conservation organizations.
With a focus on the theme of inspection, this study adds new empirical insights to emerging scholarship on the interactions public policy and private authority. The study finds that present interactions between government inspectors and inspectors of the cooperatives can mainly be defined as ‘coexistence’, rather than complementary or competitive. A lack of coordination between the two types of actors was found to result in confusion among farmers and missed opportunities for mutual learning by inspectors. The study concludes with three policy recommendations to come to a more constructive relationship between public and private inspectors in the Dutch agri-environmental governance model.