Conceptualising the Evolution of the European Union's Agri-Environment Policy: A Discourse Approach

Recent studies of the ‘greening’ process in contemporary agricultural policy have been focused chiefly on its outcomes, rather than on an assessment of the public policy significance of the underlying process. We address this question by conceptualising how greening has been mediated by agricultural policy precepts of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU). We examine how farmers' responsibilities pertaining to environmental protection and nature conservation were formalised by policy elites at the supranational level to be supportive of the core principles of the CAP. We suggest that this formalisation, culminating in 1992 with the EU's agri-environment Regulation, has enabled farming interests to use their new environmental management brief as a key element in the industry's struggle to legitimise its historic policy entitlements in the postproduction area. The theoretical basis of this paper draws upon Majone's discourse model of policy change, founded on political science and social learning literatures. We use the explanatory concepts of this model to clarify the evolution of the agri-environment initiative through textual analysis of published and confidential EU agriculture documents from the period 1973–91. Documentary evidence is corroborated by responses from semistructured interviews with senior European Commission officials in the agriculture Directorate, Directorate-General VI, involved in the policy's initiation. The core principles of the CAP emerge as crucial in shaping evolution of the EU agri-environment policy. We define the most important of these principles as occupancy of agricultural land with the aim of ensuring rural stability; and the perceived centrality of the small-scale and family farmer to the (re)structuring of rural space.