CL6-2026-GOVERNANCE-10 | Ecosystem services adoption — farmer decision-making research, NZ

Greenback is developing an ecosystem services payment platform for organic farmers in Aotearoa New Zealand and needs to understand the behavioural, economic, and relational conditions under which farmers will adopt new environmental monitoring and payment systems. Our intended farmer engagement channel runs through existing organic certification networks — but the peer knowledge transfer, cost-benefit communication, and trust-building mechanisms that would make adoption credible at scale are research questions, not solved problems.

We hold a signed letter of intent from an anchor offtaker — a leading certified organic food company operating across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia — confirming that commercial demand exists at the buyer end of the value chain. The remaining adoption challenge is at the farmer end: what does it take to move a producer from awareness to participation, and how do we design engagement and demonstration approaches that work within the culture and economics of the organic farming community?

We are seeking consortium partners with agricultural extension, farmer behaviour, rural sociology, or knowledge-to-practice expertise, where cross-regional comparison of farmer adoption conditions and on-farm demonstration approaches would be mutually valuable. We offer a Pacific Rim case study context with a distinct indigenous land stewardship tradition — mātauranga Māori — that provides a genuinely different cultural lens on farmer motivation and relationship to land, an organic farmer cohort with existing network structures, and a concrete applied decision-making challenge to anchor the research design.