Regional Mountain Conference

Agriculture is a leading cause of climate change and biodiversity loss, yet also necessary to meet nutritional needs of a growing global population. Small-scale farmers produce the majority of the world’s food and are often important stewards of highly-valued cultural landscapes. European Union strategies to achieve a sustainable transformation in European agriculture (e.g. Green New Deal) have been met with opposition by farmers across Europe (e.g. 2024 protests). At the heart of this conflict is the perceived need to regulate farming practices in order to achieve environmental goals versus the perceived need for farmers to maintain autonomy over their practices to adapt to ever changing socio-econ-environmental situations. This tension is quick to become politicized resulting in polarizing stances. This paper presents three prominent discourses in German-language media (analysing 74 print newspaper sources during 2024) around farmer’s capacity to change: 1) a conservative discourse reflects farmers’ reluctance to change; 2) a structural constraints discourse stressing systemic structural burdens inhibiting farming capacities to change; and 3) a progressive discourse presenting farmers as active change agents.  Mountain farming in the European Alps provides an interesting case to explore these tensions: dairy farming is responsible for high greenhouse gas emissions and at the same maintains Europe’s most iconic landscapes (high altitude meadows and pastures).

Autonomy of farmers is a prominent feature entangled through the divergent discourses. In certain narratives, autonomy was invoked in combination with maintenance of rural identities purporting a solution of de-regulation of agri-environmental policies. While in other narratives, autonomy was used to emphasise the importance of local contexts which often clash with top-down policy implementation. In this paper I draw on data from an in-depth collaborative ethnography with an Austrian mountain farming family in Salzburgerland, in which autonomy over time and resources is a key capacity for enabling farming resilience. The results surface tensions between local mountain farming contexts and broad policy framework, such as shifting requirements for organic dairy certification. The paper concludes with reflections on a how agri-environmental policies can become more relational, by foregrounding place-based knowing, being-with participants, reciprocal feedback cycles and shifting from responsibility to response-ability.