The methodological approach of the study was based on two hypotheses:

1. There are no direct impacts on the environment from agro-political measures, only indirect ones; the causal link is represented by the farm strategies used by the farm managers, whose choices can also be influenced by agricultural policy.
2. The choice of farm strategies does not depend on agricultural policy alone, but rather substantially on the regional and operational settings. The same agricultural political measures under differing regional and operational settings bring about differing environmental effects.

For the analysis of the interactions between agricultural politics and the environment, a multilevel analytical grid was used, that consisted of the following components:

• categorising the agro-political instruments of the EU and Switzerland into more or less homogenous groups, according to their impacts;
• operationalisation of regional influences by the formation of agro-regional types based on natural, socio-economical, and agro-economical variables (fuzzy clustering);
• recording of operational settings within each agro-regional type by a sample survey of a total of 1000 farms throughout the entire alpine arc;
• operationalisation of the term "farm strategy" based on the behaviour variables of the farm managers ascertained by the survey;
• condensation of environmentally relevant behaviour variables to environmental parameters and
  linking these parameters to an impact diagram of environmental components.

Except for the last step of this pathway, which was built on expert opinion and literature references, all interrelations were statistically analysed, whereby in most cases logistical regression was used.