Hungry [f]or public Goods? What the Scottish public Demand from an agricultural support scheme

Agricultural support payments represent a substantial transfer from taxpayers while having considerable influence on the food system. Against a backdrop of increasing scrutiny on agricultural subsidies, devolved governments of the United Kingdom (UK) are amid the greatest policy overhaul in five decades as they reform a system of support payments previously administered under the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But successful and legitimate policies require insight about the public’s preferences, for which evidence is substantially lacking. We explore public prioritisation of a large set of objectives for a future agricultural support scheme in Scotland using the Best-Worst Scaling approach and a novel modified balanced incomplete block experimental design. The survey reveals that a representative sample of the Scottish public have coherent, internally consistent visions for agricultural policy. With 92.5 % of the sample supportive of subsidies in general, the most important objective at the sample level was the production of high quality and safe food. But substantial preference heterogeneity exists; we identified three groups of citizens who backed strategies focussed on rural livelihoods, land sharing, and farm specialisation. This largely mirrors ongoing academic and policy debates around multifunctional agriculture and broad food system transformation targeting rural livelihoods and environmental objectives that map onto land sharing versus land sparing principles.