Many believe that cities (and national governments) only have legal policy instruments available that can be applied to support urban agriculture development. However, legislation is just one of the available policy instruments. Other instruments include: economic, communicative / educative and urban planning & design instruments. Each instrument is based on a specific hypothesis regarding how behaviour of actors in society can be influenced.

The logic underlying legal instruments is that actors (such as citizens or industries) can be forced to adopt a certain desired behaviour through legal norms and regulations (like norms, laws, bye-laws, ordinances, etc.) and that it is possible to control whether these actors adhere to the given rules and norms. Actors who do not adhere to the rules will be sanctioned. The most common problems with the application of legal instrument are the following:

• An increasing number of laws, bye-laws, regulations, etc. may lead to contradictions (what is allowed or promoted in one law or regulation may be prohibited or restricted in another). This situation regularly occurs regarding urban agriculture due to its multi-sectoral character (e.g. a recent city urban agricultural policy supports urban agriculture while the cities’ environmental or health regulations still forbid or severely restrict it),
• The mechanisms to enforce legal instruments are often weak due to the related costs and/or lack of political will, leading to a low level of control and sanctioning of undesired behaviour and/or to unequal treatment of the various actors (some are sanctioned while others are not; the latter are often the more powerful or influential people). Such a situation (prohibited in law, but tolerated in practice) is quite common as far as urban agriculture is concerned especially in cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The logic behind the application of economic instruments is the assumption that social actors will adopt a certain desired behaviour if this gives them some economic gains (or losses if they continue with the undesired behaviour).  Local governments for example may grant tax incentives or subsidies if actors adopt the desired behaviour or levy special taxes for undesired behaviour (similar to the levy on cigarettes or alcohol). Such economic instruments also need a legal basis (see above), but the essential element here is not the law itself but the economic incentive or loss that orients (or is supposed to orient) a certain behaviour. Several municipalities already grant tax exemptions to land owners who allow poor urban farmers use of vacant private land (see for example the municipality of Governador Valadares exempting -as per the law  Nº 5.265- private land owners from progressive property taxation if their lands are put to productive use). Others have reduced the tariffs for irrigation water or provide incentives for composting and reuse of household wastes. Economic support can also be given through supply of irrigation water, tools, seeds and compost to (poor) urban farmers.

The assumption behind the use of communicative/educative instruments is that people will adopt a certain desired behaviour if they are well informed about the positive effects of the desired behaviour as well as the negative effects of the undesired behaviour. Accordingly, information, education and persuasion tools (media programmes, extension visits, training courses, leaflets, websites, etc.) will be applied to make people understand the importance of the desired change and to assist them in the change process. Well-known examples include media-campaigns to refrain from smoking or to promote use of preservatives when having sex. Related to urban agriculture: a municipality may provide technical training to urban farmers for example or education on healthy food, food growing and food preparation to school kids. Communicative/educative instruments are often used complementary to the other policy instruments mentioned, since the lack of an adequate communication and education strategy may strongly reduce the effectiveness of the other policy instruments used. In this context, the importance of designing and implementing a strategy to communicate municipal urban agriculture policies and policy instruments to the target group should also be underlined.

The logic behind urban design instruments is that actors will adopt a certain desired behaviour if their physical environment has been designed in such a way that they are more or less automatically prompted to act a certain way: for example if public dustbins are widely available, generally people will throw less waste on the street. Examples related to urban agriculture are zoning (setting aside and protecting certain areas of the city for agriculture) , combining or separating certain land uses depending on the degree of conflict/synergy, inclusion of space for home or community gardening in social housing projects, etc. Several cities have included land designated for urban agriculture in their urban land use plan, housing or in slum upgrading projects (Wilbers and de Zeeuw, 2006).

We will illustrate several examples of the use of legal, economic, educative and design instruments in city policies and programmes on urban agriculture in the following section and Module.