Recent years, an increasing sense of urgency regarding a sustainable transition of food production have appeared across the globe. Tackling grand challenges, such as transforming the food system, involves grand endeavors. One such approach is societal missions (Mazzucato, 2018). Mission-oriented initiatives have been applied before in the agricultural sector (see Klerkx & Begemann, 2020).
While the mission approach is often seen as a break with the past (Diercks et al., 2019), insights into how mission-oriented policy frameworks and instruments "utilize or complement established instruments" (Janssen et al., 2023, p. 398) are needed. Begemann and Klerkx (2022) find that while mission goals are transformative in nature, path-departing changes are difficult due to legacies from past policy regimes, resistance from incumbent interests and path-dependent mechanisms. We address this by using the concept of post-exceptionalism (Daugbjerg & Feindt, 2017) to assess whether a newly introduced ‘societal mission for sustainable feed’ in Norway represents a transformation of the agricultural policy sector on the dimensions ideas, interests, institutions and policy. We combine this with theories of gradual institutional change to operationalize the development.
In 2022, the government launched sustainable feed as the objective of a national mission approach, stating that all feed used in aquacultural- and agricultural production should come from sustainable sources and contribute to reducing GHG-emissions within 2034 (Ministry of Education and Research, 2022). The mission approach constitutes a novel policy instrument in the Norwegian agricultural policy context. The empirical material is elite interviews with the responsible ministries and participants in a mission expert group, and statements from relevant actors submitted in the consultation process on the design and implementation of the mission.
Bridging the blue and green sector is often featured as a way to increase resource efficiency and value creation and to minimize the negative externalities of food production (Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries, 2016). We expect that the ‘sustainable feed-mission’ expands the link between agriculture and aquaculture through the common need for plant-based feed (Fry et al., 2016). We further expect that a joint mission between agricultural and aquacultural interests will contribute to breaking up the agricultural policy arena by partially involving aquacultural interests into agricultural matters. While this means a less compartmentalized policy and also an expansion of ideas in the sector, we expect the institutional structure to remain the same. Past studies have shown the persistency of the exceptional status of the agricultural sector in Norway (Farsund, 2020) and also the sector’s ability and willingness to adapt policy and arguments to contextual changes in a way that preserve and reproduce order (Melås et al., under review). Therefore, we expect a layering of new policy instruments on top of existing ones (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010) and a continuation of the existing agricultural policies overall, however, within a changed context. Insights from the study are used to discuss the prospects for transformative changes in agricultural policy and whether addressing feed across the two sectors engage "a symbiotic or contested relationship" (Daugbjerg and Feindt, 2017, p. 1573).
