The Food-as-a-commons paradigm: New discourses to break path dependency in agri-food policies

As agri-food policies in Europe – both at the Member States level and at the CAP level have been trapped in path dependence and policy lock-ins for the past fifty years, the current reform debate navigates mainly between two policy paradigms: the well-established post-exceptionalist approach, in which food is still considered as a commodity but the understanding of the sector slowly moves from being state-protected to market-regulated, and the newer paradigm supported by commons scholars who advocate for a holistic view on the agri-food sector taken care of jointly. Increasingly more initiatives deem food to be a common-pool good or a public good in the context of a variety of food issues. Focusing on examples from Germany, this paper first explains what is understood by food-as-a-commons initiatives and the respective food-as-a-commons discourses. We explore in detail two discourses: “Reducing food waste” and “Open source inputs in agriculture.” We examine and classify case studies in Germany based on a systematic literature review including manifold policy documents of 8 initiatives that belong to these two discourses. This allows us to present various levels of policy uptake, working at different speeds. Identifying characteristics based on commons theory helps us to describe the initiatives better, and especially to support explanations for the success of some initiatives over others in influencing policy on its way to building discourse and eventually to paradigm shift. Results show that initiatives that invoke ideas of core human values and are aimed at changing relatively feasible goals (changing resource allocation, but not changing governance or institutions), may be the most likely new “commons” initiatives to have policy impact.