Collective Self-Governance in the Common Agricultural Policy

The European common agricultural policy (CAP) is being reformed to shape up for the 2014-2020 era. The proposals are published in October 2011, indicating that the EU Commission envisions a greener CAP that combines agricultural production with the production of other public goods, such as nature and ecological development, environment improvement, and landscape development. Thus far only individual farmers were entitled to receive direct payments from the CAP funds. However, with the increasing collective creation of landscape and nature and ecological co production, farmers and nature organisations / citizens are increasingly cooperating. To enhance this cooperation the CAP reform proposals mention the possibility to make payments to “groups of farmers”. This paper discusses how this institutional novelty contributes to the development of successful self-governance. It assesses the opportunities and pitfalls of this collective approach and argues that groups of farmers/stakeholders are better in developing the necessary capabilities to establish successful self-governance. The governance capabilities that are being used for this assessment are: (1) reflexivity, or the capability to deal with multiple frames in society and policy; (2) resilience, or the capability to flexibly adapt to frequently occurring and uncertain changes; (3) responsiveness, or the capability to respond wisely to changing agendas and public demands; (4) revitalisation, or the capability to unblock deadlocks and stagnations in policy processes; and (5 ) scale sensitivity or the capability to observe and address cross-scale and cross-level issues (Termeer et al., 2013 and Termeer and Dewulf, forthcoming)