Digital Opportunities for Better Agricultural Policies
Recent digital innovations provide opportunities to deliver better policies for the agriculture sector by helping to overcome information gaps and asymmetries, lower policy-related transaction costs, and enable people with different preferences and incentives to work better together. Drawing on ten illustrative case studies and unique new data gathered via an OECD questionnaire on agri-environmental policy organisations' experiences with digital tools, this report explores opportunities to improve current agricultural and agri-environmental policies, and to deliver new, digitally enabled and information-rich policy approaches. It also considers challenges that organisations may face to make greater use of digital tools for policy, as well as new risks which increased use of digital tools may bring. The report provides practical advice on how policy makers can address challenges and mitigate risks to ensure digital opportunities for policy are realised in practice. Finally, the report briefly considers the broader regulatory and policy environment underpinning digitalisation of the agriculture sector, with the view to ensuring that use of digital tools for agricultural and agri-environmental policy remains coherent with the digitalisation of agriculture more generally.
Issues which may prevent digital opportunities from being realised
This chapter discusses a number of different issues which may prevent opportunities identified in Chapter 3 from being realised in practice. It discusses challenges to the successful uptake of technologies by policy makers and programme administrators and provides practical guidance in addressing them. Further, it considers new risks which may arise as digital tools are adopted to support policy in agriculture, and provides guidance on steps policy-makers and administrators can take to mitigate such risks.