Transitioning the governance of EU agricultural policy: environmental policy entrepreneurs’ strategizing for changing governance arrangements towards greater post-exceptionalism

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the oldest and most contested EU policies. In recent years call for reform mostly focussed on greening, stemming from the sector’s contribution to climate change, its potential for remediation, and its climate vulnerability all at the same time. Over the years the CAP has therefore been subject to various reforms, yet past reforms have so far been described as insufficient with regards to greening. To explain this slow reform process, scholarship on post-exceptionalism has been studying the co-existence of old and new elements in the dimensions underlying agricultural policy arrangements. In challenging these arrangements in general, and addressing environmental challenges more specifically, post-exceptionalist scholarship has pointed towards the potential of environmental policy entrepreneurs. However, so far little is known about how they attempt to do so. More specifically, the precise strategic actions these actors have employed in targeting the various dimensions underlying post-exceptionalist arrangements remain underexplored. I aim to contribute to closing this gap and as such to the scholarship on post-exceptionalism by exploring the strategic attempts of environmental policy entrepreneurship for challenging the ideas, institutions, and policies underlying the current governance arrangements of the EU agricultural policy sector. In doing so, I intend to shed light on how entrepreneurs’ strategic actions change over time and differ between the underlying dimension they aim to target. My research therefore asks: How are environmental policy entrepreneurs strategizing to transform the governance of the EU’s agricultural policy sector towards greening and as such greater post-exceptionalism? I answer this question by comparing the 2013 and post-2020 CAP reform processes. In a first step, I identify relevant environmental policy entrepreneurs for this timeframe using the Commission’s Transparency Register and Euractiv.com. Building upon this, I conduct semi-structured interviews with previously identified environmental policy entrepreneurs to explore how they strategize to significantly change the dimensions underlying post-exceptional arrangements and how effective they perceive this process. My preliminary analysis suggests that environmental policy entrepreneurs in the EU’s agricultural policy field stem from diverse actor networks that employ diverse strategic actions. To different degrees I have identified entrepreneurs from environmental NGOs, the Directorate-General Environment and Members of Parliament. Just as diverse as these entrepreneurs are, so too are the intentional strategic actions they employ, ranging from issue framing to manipulating decision-making authority. There appear to be differences between the actors in the dimensions environmental policy entrepreneurs target and resulting from that the strategic actions they employ. Environmental policy entrepreneurs are, however, not always consciously targeting one of the dimensions underlying post-exceptional arrangements. Instead, my preliminary results suggest that some strategic actions are employed for targeting multiple dimensions at the same time. Finally, my preliminary results point towards the role of networks in collaborating in strategizing processes and as such increasing the perceived effectiveness of strategic attempts.