Climate Policy Integration in Agriculture: From a multi-functional to a net-zero in Norwegian support negotiations.

Policy integration is widely recognized as crucial to governing of societal challenges cutting across a wide array of societal sectors, such as climate change. In this paper, we develop a new and more nuanced understanding of how climate policy integration may work in sector-specific decision-making procedures. Combining a processual understanding of climate policy integration, with the institutional logics tradition within neo-institutionalism, this paper develops a concept that enable us to analytically capture and understand a broad array of integrative efforts. Integrating climate policy within the agricultural sector has been deemed crucial by both policymakers and researchers, but such integration is not straightforward. This paper specifies three different ideal models of climate policy integration in the agricultural sector: multifunctional, market failure and net-zero. Empirically, the paper finds a remarkable shift in models over time in climate policy integration within Norwegian agricultural policy, from 2006 to 2021. The multifunctional model dominated for many years, although the governmental actors also eventually came to promote a market failure understanding of climate policy integration. Eventually, a net-zero understanding was introduced by the Norwegian government, but the agricultural organizations continued to promote a multifunctional model of integration.