PRUDENT aspires to change the way agriculture and forestry systems currently operate and to accelerate the transition to sustainable agriculture and forestry practices and smart farming technologies. The project will identify and evaluate the most effective green nudges, in the context of appropriate behavioural and experimental settings, that can enable farmer/forester behavioural change to more sustainable agriculture and forestry. Nudges will be also tested in natural contexts to evaluate the interactive effect of nudges with actual policy changes in the transition to sustainability. Innovative nudging tools, in the form of web/mobile apps, will be employed to boost farmer/forester self-regulatory capacity and enhance the durability of nudging effects. Four different systems, representing major farming and forestry systems in Europe (arable crops [wheat], perennial crops [grapevines, apples, olives], livestock [bovines] and forests [boreal forests]) in various EU regions (Northern, Southern, and Central Europe) will be studied to account for the heterogeneity of farming/forestry systems and contexts in the EU. The behavioural insights are used to develop transformative pathways, via social innovations, business models and policy recommendations, to encourage transition to fair, healthy and environmentally-friendly agriculture and forestry systems. PRUDENT will provide a set of social innovations and business models establishing roadmaps for a shift towards sustainable agriculture and forestry and will develop a series of policy recommendations and tools to foster behaviourally informed policy design and implementation. Throughout the project's lifespan, multiple value chain actors, at various levels of society, will actively participate in co-creation activities to establish a mutual understanding of the benefits and bottlenecks of the value chain, as well as effective transformation pathways to change.

The overall objective of Contracts2.0 is to develop novel contract-based approaches to incentivise farmers for the increased provision of environmental public goods along with private goods using result-based, collective, land tenure and value chain approaches. Newly developed contract-based approaches are environmentally more effective, economically viable for farmers and support the longevity of contractual arrangements. Moreover, they enlarge farmers’ entrepreneurial freedom and responsibility, and are better adapted to the relevant temporal and spatial scales of specific environmental goods. Contracts2.0 improves existing and designs new contracts in rural areas to realise synergies on the ground: Therefore, Contracts2.0 adapts a Design Thinking process using a six-step iterative process of analytical and creative steps to design and test novel contracts. Further, Contracts2.0 describes novel contract design principles as well as policy guidelines to provide facilitating policy framework. Contracts2.0 activates the experience of 11 existing innovation initiatives and 13 action partners around Europe as a basis for the novel contracts. The initiatices are involved in all steps of the project and i) are pivotal in our analysis of existing initiatives in our 'innovation labs', ii) support experimental testing of novel contract features, and iii) test novel models on the ground. Contracts2.0 provides: An inventory and SWOT analysis of existing result-based, collective, land tenure and value chain approaches; a catalogue of factors facilitating and hindering existing approaches; a set of novel contract design principles; a guideline for policy framework fostering contract-based approaches and the development of appropriate agri-environmental-climate policies; a set of tailor made communication and dissemination materials for target audiences, and new cooperation and innovation networks for ongoing improvement of rural development policies and instruments.