The purpose of this paper is to draw up a state of the art of the design of the agroenvironmental contract and its impact on farmers’ participation. The diversity of arrangements in Europe and around the world leads us to focus on contract design and its impact on participation, based on four dimensions: maintaining or changing practices, action-oriented or result-oriented payment, uniform or differentiated payment between farmers, individual or collective payment. The state of the art recalls that measures aiming to maintain practices are not a solution to all issues. Furthermore, innovative measures do not have a clearly positive impact on farmers’ participation.