Solution directions for intensive dairy farms in the Netherlands: Where is the common ground?

The Dutch dairy farming sector struggles to discontinue unsustainable practices and transition to sustainability. The sector is in dire need of phasing out scale-intensive practices that contribute to high nitrogen emissions and reduced animal welfare. However, despite a tentative consensus on ultimate aims, no progress is being made. In a highly polarised societal debate, different stakeholders favour distinct solutions for reducing the industry's negative effects. The observed directionality failure, resulting from fierce contestation over possible solutions, limits proper action coordination. What can the government then do to achieve alignment on solutions and unravel this contestation? As emphasised in the debate on governing wicked problems and societal challenges, it tends to be difficult to make a coherent connection between how problems are interpreted, what solutions are seen as viable, and what policies to employ. Connecting these three elements is challenging due to ambiguity about solution outcomes, following from a plurality of perspectives on issues like the effectiveness, efficiency, viability and legitimacy of solutions. Providing directionality in the face of such ambiguity (and ensuing contestation) requires a governance approach that can open up this debate and overcome misalignment. To study this, we employ a multi-criteria mapping (MCM) analysis that, through structured interviews, allows respondents to assess solution directions from multiple and opposing perspectives. Based on extensively searching relevant policy documents and through field-actor consultations (with farmers, policy actors at different levels of government, agricultural initiatives etc.), a set of solution directions was identified: technological farm-level innovations, ceasing dairy farming, switching to nature-inclusive farming, switching to crop production, moving farms to less sensitive areas, and maximising output per plot. In the conducted MCM interviews, respondents are asked to score these options based on the criteria and weights they design. The obtained data contains numeric valuations, as well as corresponding argumentations for the provided scores, criteria and weights. The MCM results illustrate the difficulty of governing destabilisation in contested policy fields. Acknowledging the ambiguity underlying this contestation enables the development of governance arrangements that could overcome this. For the field, the results focus not only on the divergence between actors but also on where commonality can be found. This offers a starting point for unravelling policy contestation and informs policymaking processes by revealing points of alignment.