Civil society actors at the nexus of the ecosystem services concept and agri-environmental policies

•Civil society actors may help to integrate the ES concept into agri-environmental policies.•We support our arguments for collaboration using successful case studies.•We demonstrate how collaboration with CSAs can be fostered. This viewpoint is based on the premise that it may be reasonable to further integrate the ecosystem services (ES) concept into agri-environmental policies, particularly into agri-environmental measures (AEMs). Building on this, we show that collaboration between the government and civil society actors (CSAs) may offer many opportunities to integrate the ES concept into AEMs. Furthermore, we demonstrate how collaboration with CSAs can be fostered and we provide some future research directions that should be considered.