Policy Change Through Negotiated Agreements: Analyzing Conditions in Swiss Agricultural Policy

Negotiated agreements refer to policy changes that come about whenever policy actors manage to design a policy solution that a majority of political camps can support. This paper revisits characteristics of and conditions for negotiated agreements using the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF). We analyze the policy process and coalition constellations characterizing the agreement resulting from a reform of the Swiss agricultural policy, which achieved a surprising level of policy change by promoting agricultural production practices with an intended positive effect on the environment and climate change. Results show that a participatory process enabled the careful drafting of instruments to distribute benefits across coalitions, which were formed by secondary beliefs on policy instruments rather than core beliefs. In addition, the successful policy reform was negotiated despite strong support for the status quo by a conservative coalition. The institutionalized periodic reform of the Swiss agricultural policy can in part explain this unexpected result. Nonetheless, this challenges the current ACF’s definition of a negotiated agreement and indicates that we need further research on what characterizes negotiated agreements.