Institutional Forcings on Agricultural Landscapes in Post-Socialist Europe: Diachronic Hotspot Analysis of CAP Influences on Agricultural Land Use in Romania 2002-2024

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a very large and complicated suite of policy instruments that influences agricultural activities across the EU. The land change community has paid scant attention to institutional forcings on land change, apart from protected areas for biodiversity management. We propose a diachronic hotspot analysis for Romania that focuses attention on agricultural land use changes following four triggering events: (i) when Romania entered the EU and CAP in 2007; (ii) the 2013 CAP reforms; (iii) the “post-2020” CAP reforms, which are necessarily convolved during this project duration with (iv) the manifold repercussions of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. CAP programs include livelihood payments to farmers, environmental protections, rural development projects, and other incentives. We seek to understand how the diffusion of innovation—here CAP program enrollments and payments—work to influence land use change and how availability of broad-band services may affect the diffusion process. 

As the key EO response variable, we will focus on a suite of three phenometrics calculated from a combination of Landsat/HLS vegetation indices and MODIS/VIIRS land surface temperature time series. We will use CORINE land cover products (2006, 2012, 2018) and EUCROPMAP, a recent 10m EU-wide Sentinel-1 based crop type map to “bundle” land surface phenologies to reveal land changes, complemented by relevant geospatial data, including higher spatial resolution Planet products and other Very High Resolution data available through NASA’s CSDA program. Change analysis on the phenometrics will use newer approaches to Before-After-Control-Impact (BACI) analysis, including Progressive Change BACI Paired Series, CI-divergence, and CI-contribution.  

We will apply econometric models to socio-economic data from the National Institute of Statistics and CAP payment data from the Agency for Payments and Interventions in Agriculture at the level of Romania’s 41 counties (judeţe) with substantial agricultural land use. We will conduct three field campaigns to collect surveys from farmers and in-depth interviews with farmers and knowledge agents to contextualize our findings from the change analyses. 

Our Romanian collaborators have deep experience with spatial planning, urban-rural interactions, policy impacts on urban and rural development, and sustainable regional development. This 36-month project will advance knowledge about land change dynamics under complex institutional policies and programs as well as evaluate the proximate impacts of regional conflict on agricultural land use.