Depoliticisation, Politicisation and Limited Policy Change: Explaining Post-Exceptionalism in the CAP

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) is a prime example of a post-exceptionalist public policy with mutually reinforcing ideas, institutions, interests and policy instruments (Daugbjerg and Feindt 2017, Greer 2017). An exceptionalist policy frame that justifies and demands sector-specific income support for agricultural producers was established in the founding treaties of the European Communities in 1957 and has quasi-constitutional status. Within this frame, sector-specific policies were developed that created various self-reinforcing policy feedback mechanisms, in particular support from benefitting farm groups and entrenched ideational power (Feindt 2017). Since the late 1980s, environmental, consumer-oriented and animal welfare ideas and policies were integrated into the CAP, maintaining the exceptionalist outlook that agriculture differs from other sectors while shifting the supporting arguments. In effect, however, income support to producers remains the core of the CAP while non-productivist policy elements stay at the margins. In the run-up to its periodical renewal, which is due by 2020, the CAP has received increasing criticism, as summarized in two reports by the European Court of Auditors (2017, 2018) that question the underlying rationale for sector-specific income support, the effectiveness of the main policy instruments and the efficiency in the use of public funds. The legislative proposals presented by the European Commission in June 2018 propose a ‘new delivery model’ for the CAP but would allow member states, who will be given more discretion, to continue current producer-oriented policies. Responses by the Council and the Parliament point to an even higher degree of status quo orientation. The dominance of a producer-oriented, weak post-exceptionalism stands in stark contrast to cross-disciplinary scientific diagnosis of the CAP as a failed and dysfunctional policy design that requires transformational change. The puzzle addressed in this paper is why evidence-based scandalization of the income support policies in the CAP has not led to a stronger drive towards policy change. The two starting points are the portrait of the CAP as a highly technical and therefore depoliticized policy area (e.g., Grant 1995) and the general assumption that politicization is necessary for policy change. Using the four-layered post-exceptionalism framework (Daugbjerg and Feindt 2017) and a broad concept of (de)politicization (Wood 2016), the paper argues that the construction of the CAP involves a complicated entanglement of depoliticization and politicization. On the one hand, the management and administration of the CAP instruments trough committee systems and specialized agencies are characteristic for a depoliticization strategy. On the other hand, the recurrent renegotiation of the CAP in line with the EU`s seven-year budget cycle is a highly politicized process implicating struggles within the Commission and high-level negotiations involving all member state governments as well as powerful European parliamentarians. The paper shows that both the technocratic depoliticization and the bargaining-oriented politicization during inter-institutional negotiations constitute formidable barriers to policy change. The paper concludes that a transformative reform would require politicization at the constitutional level to break up the self-reinforcing policy feedback mechanisms. Final considerations reflect on the implications for other areas of public policy.