Land-Sparing and Land-Sharing in Dutch National Parks: A Historical and Transition Perspective

Global biodiversity rates remain in decline despite the fact that worldwide 16% of the land is protected. Some argue that to stop the biodiversity decline, a shift from “land-sparing” (agricultural production and nature conservation on different plots of land) towards “land-sharing” (both activities on the same plot of land) may be needed. We use the regime dimensions of the multi-level perspective to analyze the development and implementation of land-sparing and land-sharing in Dutch national parks as they are experimenting with this. Our qualitative text-based analysis of Dutch national park policy documents from 1930 until 2022 shows that the first Dutch national parks focused on nature conservation and land-sparing. In contrast, the so-called Dutch national landscape parks were the first serious attempt to integrate nature conservation and agriculture and to implement land-sharing. However, this failed because of the misalignment between nature conservation and agriculture at that time. A new attempt is currently being made with the national parks “new style” in which more land-sharing should take place. We argue that for this, a hybrid agriculture nature-conservation regime is needed for which different dimensions of both regimes should align, which currently appears to be starting in The Netherlands.