Globally agricultural policies addressing the biodiversity and climate crises are increasingly characterised by diversified funding landscapes that combine public and private models. Existing research examines policy through individual agri-environment schemes with limited understanding of how agricultural transitions are enacted across multiple funding mechanisms and the work required to navigate and sustain engagement. This paper addresses this gap by examining how diversified agri-environmental funding systems are made workable in practice, providing one of the first integrated and in-depth analyses of England’s post-Brexit agri-environmental funding landscape and, in doing so, providing insights into the potential interactions with the statutory planning system in the delivery of nature recovery.

Drawing on a systematic funding matrix, consultation reports, and 14 interviews with farmers and land managers, the study documents the scale and diversity of emerging agri-environmental funding arrangements, showing how the resulting governance complexity is experienced and managed in everyday decision-making. The analysis shows that diversification intensifies and redistributes labour, much of which remains unrecognised and under-resourced. This ‘hidden work’ has implications for equity, participation, and the sustainability of transitions with transferability to a range of global policy areas and implications for the overlap with planning for nature recovery.

By reframing the work of agri-environmental transition, this paper makes a substantive contribution to applied environmental management. The framework developed offers transferable insights for international policymakers and practitioners designing agri-environmental interventions in other contexts characterised by funding diversification and institutional complexity.