Sustainable Food Systems in the EU: Identifying Coalitions and their Narrative Strategies in the Policy Debate

Newly elected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced her ambitious plan to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent with a European Green Deal in December 2019. The Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F), an integral component of the Green Deal, targets food from production to consumption, requires significant reduction of chemical inputs in agricultural systems, and challenges the Common Agriculture Policy as the primary policy on EU food systems, which has been criticized for not delivering on sustainability objectives. Which coalitions exist in the EU policy debate on sustainable food systems, and which narrative strategies do they use to communicate their interests to the European Commission? As part of the EU open public consultation process, roadmaps offer citizens and collective entities the opportunity to comment on potential legislation. This study analyzes the feedback responses received on the F2F Roadmap during its four-week consultation process conducted February – March 2020. Empirically, this study analyzes 433 of 655 total feedback responses received to map coalitions using Philip Leifeld’s Discourse Network Analysis. The Narrative Policy Framework is then used to examine the narrative strategies of coalitions, namely: 1) angel-devil shift and 2) cost-benefit frames. The findings show differences in the use of narrative strategies between coalitions in the policy debate on sustainable food systems.