Race to the Bottom or Differentiated Implementation? Measuring and Explaining Environmental Policy Integration in the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (2022-2027)

Over the last three decades, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has undergone significant changes to its ideational framework and policy design, which were originally focused on providing income support to farmers. Since the late 1980s, environmental objectives have been increasingly integrated into the CAP, accompanied by new instruments addressing environmental issues, indicating a significant level of environmental policy integration (EPI). At the same time, the ecological effectiveness of these instruments has been assessed as rather low. While existing analyses of EPI in the CAP focus either on the EU level or on individual case studies, demonstrating that environmental considerations were employed to legitimize the continuation of farm income support as the policy core, a comparative approach across all Member States is still lacking. In this paper, we adopt the concept of differentiated policy implementation (DPI), i.e. the diversity in the existence and use of discretion during the implementation of legal and practical policies in the EU, to measure and explain the integration of environmental concerns in the CAP across member states. Despite a prescribed set of agri-environmental objectives and instruments, the implementation varies widely among member states. By adjusting the relative budget allocation between different policy instruments and the concrete design of individual measures, member states make use of flexibility provided by the shared European legal framework. From a DPI perspective, an important rationale for granting Member States discretion is the assumption that adapting to domestic contexts will lead to better implementation outcomes. Methodologically, we apply a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to analyse the diversity in the implementation of two CAP instruments, eco-schemes and agri-environmental and climate measures (AECM), and their calibrations across member states. The analysis is based on the 28 CAP Strategic Plans submitted by Member States for the 2023–2027 programming period. The comparative analysis of the instrument calibration shows great variation across member states in allocating the budget between instruments and determining the stringency of individual measures. However, the different variations of agri-environmental policy instrument calibration indicate different shades of weak EPI rather than leading to better implication outcomes. By identifying conjunctural pathways, i.e. specific combinations of conditions, the analysis explores dif-ferent strategies adopted by member states explaining weak EPI. Overall, analysing the integration of environmental concerns from the perspective of the DPI provides a better understanding of how Member States use their discretion within the CAP to diminish environmentally-related issues, despite an EU-wide set of predetermined agri-environmental objectives and instruments. The focus on instrument provides additional insight into how environmental considerations are used to justify income support for farms.