Collective action for conservation
There is strong evidence that effective land management often requires access to large, continuous areas - something more easily achieved through groups of farmers and other landholders working together. Trust is essential to ensure that funding promotes meaningful and effective collaboration. This tool places trust at the center, recognizing that the entire process depends on building and maintaining it.
What you will achieve with this tool?
Unpack the importance of funding group faciliation for landscape-scale conservation.
Get inspired by: England’s Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund (CSFF)
After limited success with individualised agri-environment payments under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), grassroots farmer clusters emerged as an alternative approach to implementing conservation on farmland. These clusters aim to foster coordinated action among local land managers to ensure conservation is “bigger, better, and more joined-up” (Lawton, 2011). Building on these early experiments in collaborative conservation, the government in England launched the CSFF in 2015 to:
Fund farmer group facilitation
Achieve more effective environmental outcomes at landscape scale
To date:
8 funding rounds have been completed
£2.5 million allocated per round
220 groups created (100 still active)
Over 6,000 members involved
450,000 hectares of farmland covered
Although the funding has now been closed to new applicants, the CSFF has shown that funding collaborative land management, grounded in trust, can contribute to meaningful conservation.
Explore how to take action
Remember, this is an inspiration guide (not a recipe) to help you decide what will be most transformative for your context. Every context is unique!
With whom and for whom are you transforming?
Is sufficient funding allocated for network facilitation in your landscape-scale initiative?
What actions are you taking to keep collaboration a lived, ongoing process?
What unintended consequences might arise (e.g., exclusion of non-funded groups)?
Effective landscape-scale conservation depends on farmers’ buy-in to collaboration.
This is crucial for achieving scale and ensuring those tasked with implementing conservation measures see value in long-term participation. Anticipating unintended consequences allows early steps to mitigate harm and proactively integrate solutions.
Exclusion is one of the most imminent negative consequences, and this must not become a constant or deliberate exclusion of specific groups.
For those who cannot be included in the program due to budget constraints, alternative pathways, such as opening dialogue tables, can ensure their voices are heard and perspectives considered.
By fostering inclusive networks and sustained dialogue, this tool helps align diverse stakeholders toward shared goals, reducing fragmentation and building trust and collaboration, the heart of collective action for conservation and a nature-positive, climate-neutral future.
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