The Politics of Pesticides. Water Pollution and the State

The regulation of pesticides is an important part of governing micropollutants in water and therefore governing water quality in general. “Plant protection products” or “pesticides” – the nomenclature alone stands for two very different perspectives: One perspective emphasizes an unquestionable societal benefit of synthetic chemicals as increasing agriculture yields. The other perspective stresses the toxicity of substances that are designed to eliminate target organisms such as weeds, fungi or pests but which also affect non-target organisms, leading to lethal or sub-lethal consequences in different waterbodies. In this contribution we start from the assumption that regulation of plant protection products in Germany - as part of the European multi-level governance system - is, ultimately, not protecting water bodies from pollution; and that this pollution endangers the health of aquatic ecosystems. Why does pollution of water bodies by pesticides persist despite intense state activity? In order to better understand why regulation is not able to effectively solve this ecological problem, we propose a new method to analyze the discursive politics of pesticides, combining expert interviews, visualizations of the political life cycle of chemical pollutants and document analysis. We are particularly interested in how regulatory failure interacts with the environmental policy problem-solving capacity of states with regards to hazardous - diffuse - chemical inputs. Our normative aim here is to investigate to what extent the state should – in theory – be able to solve such problems (rather than describing the governance constellations that lead to its shortcomings); and why, in practice, efforts are falling short. For this, we offer six hypotheses of why and how the state and its public representatives are failing to protect water bodies: 1. Existing policies that are biased towards agricultural interests 2. Administrative apathy 3. Diverging problem perceptions 4. The political economy of complexity 5. Regulatory and conceptual capture 6. Polarised political context We explore these hypotheses based on qualitative, semi-standardized research interviews with decision-makers and experts from policy-making, administration, political associations, science and societal stakeholders. The interviewees represent the political multi-level system from the municipality to the EU (and beyond), in which German water and environmental policy is inevitably embedded.