Understanding sustainability transformations through policy instruments: Shifting ideas of social control in the implementation of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy in Germany (2023-2027)

Policy instruments, i.e. the tools used by governments to allocate resources, distribute budgets, and influence behaviour, are a crucial dimension of governing sustainability transformations. A series of reforms of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) since 1992 have added sustainability-related objectives and instruments. However, rather than effectively addressing new challenges such as environmental degradation or animal welfare, they primarily serve to sustain the exceptionalist legacy of income support for farmers (Alons, 2017). One aspect that has received limited consideration in post-exceptionalism literature is that policy instruments are not merely tools to achieve contingent objectives, but also bearers of information about political interactions. We apply a political sociology perspective to re-evaluate processes of change in the CAP. Following this approach, policy instruments “reveal a (fairly explicit) theorisation of the relationship between the governing and the governed” (Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2007, p. 11). Instruments constitute a “condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it” (ibid.). By examining the CAP’s historical development from this perspective, Grant (2010) has shown how policy changes can be explained by the exhaustion and long-term contradictions of policy instruments that in the 1990s were no longer in tune with broader political trends. Internal contradictions and external pressures combined led to substantial change in the CAP instruments away from price support towards direct income transfers. More than a decade after Grant’s analysis, it is time to re-assess the role of CAP’s internal contradictions and external pressures, given the enormous challenges reflected e.g. in the European Green Deal. In this paper, we ask what the CAP instruments tell about the politics of sustainable transformation in agri-food policy. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the EU’s legislative texts for the CAP 2023-2027 and its implementation in Germany, we reconstruct the implicit theories of social control underlying the changing policy instruments in the CAP. The recent reform introduced a "new delivery model" that requires member states to link all instruments – including income support measures – to specific objectives, and explain the intervention mechanism. While this reflects external pressures to legitimize the CAP by aligning it with socially desired outcomes, it also betrays shifting theories of social control. New instruments e.g. Eco Schemes, Social Conditionality or animal-related interventions indicate that long-established income transfers are increasingly linked to conditions that express a changing social contract with stronger regards for ecological entities, labour rights, or animals. This new governance arrangement expands public authorities’ and taxpayers’ ways to control farming practices. This in turn reflects broader changes in human-nature, human-animal and human-human relationships, the rise of the environmental state and shifts in the institutional relations between the EU and its member states. By reconstructing the shifting theories of social control implicit in policy instruments, this research adds to previous understandings of post-exceptionalism in agri-food policies adding a more nuanced understanding of the location and the functioning of power relations in the CAP, and in policy mixes in general.