Insights into Bureaucracy on Austrian Farms
This interim report presents the initial results of the project "Making Bureaucracy Accessible". The project was launched in September 2024 by staff members of the University College for Agricultural and Environmental Education, together with an interdisciplinary team of various cooperation partners. The goal of the project is to make the concept of bureaucracy more understandable from the perspective of farmers. The background of the study is the increasing bureaucracy, which was identified as one of the greatest challenges for agriculture in the Vision 2028+ survey.
The project examines the bureaucratic requirements that farmers must fulfill for both private and public institutions on their farms, highlighting twelve selected case studies. The focus is on time and financial effort as well as the practical implementation of these administrative tasks. Additionally, the role of digital tools is examined. Another key component of the study is the perception of farmers regarding the benefits and burdens of these bureaucratic tasks.
The interim report provides a theoretical foundation for the concept of bureaucracy, exploring its origin as well as key characteristics and dimensions from various disciplinary perspectives. This was supplemented by a literature review on studies of bureaucracy on l farms in different European countries. Furthermore, eleven preliminary discussions with farmers were conducted, and the theoretical perspective was compared with the practical perspective. Both the literature and the preliminary discussions have shown that there is no uniform definition of bureaucracy and that its perception among farmers varies greatly. However, certain bureaucratic tasks were identified in the preliminary discussions that most of the respondents perceive as bureaucratic.
The collected insights form the basis for the in-depth case study survey in the spring/summer of 2025.
Further information about the project can be found under https://dafne.at/projekte/burokratie
Project duration: 01.09.2024–31.08.2025
Project team members
Theresa Eichhorn and Leopold Kirner (both University College for Agricultural and Environmental Education), Sarah Lappöhn (Federal Institute of Agricultural Economics, Rural and Mountain Research), Franz Fensl (LBG Austria), Otto Hofer (Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Regions and Water Management), Franz Hunger (Upper Austrian Chamber of Agriculture), Siegfried Pöchtrager (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences)
