Crowdfunding of GHG mitigation measures in agriculture: A feasible contribution to the climate challenges? Sociocultural constraints and enablers in Norway

ABSTRACT

Agriculture is one sector under pressure when it comes to mitigation of climate change. To overcome the economic barriers preventing greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation measures from being implemented, this paper explores whether crowdfunding could be a feasible solution to this problem. The paper theoretically and empirically explores sociocultural barriers and enablers for crowdfunding aimed at agricultural GHG mitigation measures in Norway. The empirical analysis is based on focus-group interviews with farmers as potential fund-seekers and citizens as potential backers. The data are analysed in light of certain cultural characteristics previously identified as typical for Norway. Our findings indicate that, while these cultural characteristics manifest themselves in a crowdfunding context, they are not all-embracing. Our analysis points to opportunities for successful crowdfunding for GHG mitigation measures in agriculture given the right premises and including the right motivated people.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate mitigation
• crowdfunding
• agriculture
• sociocultural conditions
• Norway

Acknowledgements

This study was financed by The Research Council of Norway (grant number 268223). We wish to thank two other work packages in the project that invited us to gather the data needed for this study. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions contributed to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Internet-based platforms facilitate funding of a particular campaign by linking fundraisers to backers (Belleflamme et al., 2015).

2. For lending-based crowdfunding, the increase concerns business and property lending – not consumer lending (Shneor, 2021).

3. The quite high share of respondents without a clear standpoint may be due to Norwegian farmers’ generally weak knowledge of crowdfunding as such (Anonymous, 2019).

4. This word may be translated as “just enough” or sufficient.