Realigning state-citizen relationships in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy post-2022: An analysis of public encounters in CAP implementation in Germany

The recent reform of the European Union’s (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) for the funding period 2023-2027 continues the general trend in the CAP since 1992 to add sustainability-oriented objectives and instruments to traditional farm income support. The main mechanisms are linking direct income transfers to compliance with environmental, climate, health, or animal welfare requirements as well as remunerating farmers for more sustainable management practices. However, first assessments find it unlikely that the new CAP will deliver on the ambitious sustainability rhetoric as articulated, e.g., in the Green Deal; instead, it will primarily serve to maintain the exceptionalist legacy of income support for farmers (Daugbjerg & Feindt 2022). Although the new CAP is expected provide only limited support for a sustainable transformation of the agricultural sector, the proliferating conditioning of farm payments affects the relationship between CAP beneficiaries and the state. The exceptionalist policy heritage includes special administrative bodies and support institutions that facilitate the CAP’s administration and tie farmers to the policy on the ground. Whether and how state-farmer relationships have been realigned through the CAP's reformed policy arrangement has received limited attention in the literature on post-exceptionalism. We apply a bottom-up perspective to examine the state-citizen relationships in the CAP post-2022. This perspective emphasizes the importance of implementation, in which policies, alongside the formulation and adoption of policy goals and instruments, take their final form and substance. One approach to analyzing citizen-state relationships in implementation is provided by the concept of “public encounters”, i.e. the interactions where state and citizens meet (Goodsell 1981). In the CAP, these public encounters come in many shades and shapes, including contacts with representatives in lower administrative authorities, official extension services, inspectors during on-farm controls or mediated via policy artefacts, e.g., application forms for funding programs. In this paper, we ask what the state-farmers interactions tell us about the politics of policy reforms and implementation. Methodologically, the research is based on a political ethnography of implementation in the CAP post-2022 in Germany. More specifically, a case study in a county in northern Hesse (Germany) will examine farmers' encounters with CAP via the generation of different types of qualitative data (document analysis, interviews, observations). The recent CAP reform introduced new policy instruments such as eco-schemes, social conditionality or some animal-related interventions, which link long-established farm payments to compliance with further requirements, thereby expanding the opportunities for public authorities to control farming practices. At the same time, the new instruments are implemented in existing administrative settings, which in Germany carry an exceptionalist tradition. Inquiring the experiences in public encounters can provide a lens into the (re-)alignment of state-farmer relationships in the post-exceptionalist arrangement of the CAP post-2022. By applying a bottom-up perspective and focusing on public encounters, this study complements previous research on post-exceptionalism by adding a more nuanced understanding of the locus and character of power relations and its legitimacy implications in the CAP.