Coordinating Food Security Policy in Two Different Ideational Settings: A Comparison of Norway and Australia

Food security has emerged as a relatively new policy issue in domestic agricultural policy making in developed countries. Policy making in this area provides a unique opportunity for analysing how inter-institutional coordination and conflict unfold as the policy issue cuts across different policy sectors. Inter-institutional policy making introduces new dynamics into policy making and boundaries between already well-established policy fields may be reconfigured. The policy problem of food security is addressed within an already established institutional landscape in which agricultural ideas and institutions are well-established. In this paper we compare food security policy making in Norway and Australia. In Norway agricultural policy making has been dominated by agricultural exceptionalism while in Australia agricultural normalism (market liberalism) has been dominant since the mid-1980s. We examine whether and how these two opposing ideational foundations have influenced the food security policy debate and institutional arrangements for policy coordination in the two countries.