How did soil health become a policy problem? Unearthing the crisis discourse and institutionalisation of soil health in EU policy making

This contribution examines how soil health reappeared on the decision agenda of European Union (EU) policy-making after being relegated to the periphery for several years. It employs a discourse institutionalist approach with a particular focus on the pivotal role played by the crisis discourse related to agri-food systems. Emphasising the crisis discourse as a catalyst, this study explores how the discourse of soil degradation as a pressing crisis led to its recognition and subsequent institutionalisation within EU policy domains. In order to establish how soil health emerged as an issue of concern in the policy environment, I employ process tracing (Collier, 2011) as a methodology. We first contextualise soil health in a broader context by establishing a timeline of events, ranging from the first appearance of the soil health concept in EU policy-making to its presence (or absence) in the EU Commission’s proposal for a Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience published in July 2023. While establishing the timeline, we select the empirical material within which we trace back the soil health concept. It constitutes policy documents from the main EU institutions, policy papers by the main organised interest groups that the policy debates refer to as well as supplementary material reflecting the civil society originating from EU public consultations. We complement this material with key informant interviews in order to identify counterfactual outcomes and alternative choices or events. These can be different actor constellations, priorities and mobilised knowledges leading to scenarios where soil health would not have emerged as a prominent topic of policy-making again, or where more binding targets would have been included in the Commission’s legislative proposal. We then analyse the empirical material with Mayring’s and Steigleder’s qualitative content analysis method in order to identify how discourses evolved for soil health to emerge as a policy-problem. This methodology serves to unveil the discursive strategies employed by various actors to construct and amplify narratives around the urgency and severity of soil health challenges. Furthermore, it elucidates the symbiotic relationship between crisis discourse and institutional dynamics, delineating how discursive constructions of crisis have shaped and reshaped institutional structures, thereby influencing policy agendas and decision-making processes. A potential finding may be the targeted employment of the greening discourse, which regularly appears as a justification framework in EU agri-environment policy-making (Erjavec & Erjavec, 2015). Applied to soil policy, the EU may offer ‘green’ fixes to soil management as an easy solution to the major contemporary socio-environmental challenges - the (perceived) crisis - that our agri-food systems are subject to.