Simplification Without Satisfaction: Bureaucracy Blaming and the Affective Burden in EU Agri-Environmental Policy

In response to the Europe-wide farmers’ protests of 2023/2024, the European co-legislators have developed and adopted a series of legislative proposals to address the articulated dissatisfaction with agricultural policy. Across these legislative initiatives, “simplification” emerged as a central po-litical strategy, framing complex regulations and excessive agri-environmental requirements as one of the main sources of farmers’ discontent. While the simplification strategy initially helped to con-tain protest, both the continuing environmental challenges and the re-emergence of farmers’ pro-tests in Brussels in late 2025 raise questions about the durability of this response and the sources of persistent dissatisfaction. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to explain the mechanisms through which bu-reaucracy is used as a scapegoat for farmers’ dissatisfaction, and why a political strategy that follows this argument is unlikely to address the underlying causes of discontent. By treating bureaucracy as the problem to be fixed, policy-makers risk misdiagnosing the sources of dissatisfaction, simply viewing administrative burden as a cognitive, material and technical problem. This does not mean that complaints about excessive bureaucracy are false, but they can also be understood as expres-sions of underlying tensions in the relationship between farmers and state. Environmental requirements represent a priority target for simplification efforts. In agricultural poli-cy, environmental instruments are typically layered on top of existing instruments and are associated with comparatively high administrative and compliance costs including rule complexity, reporting requirements, and transaction costs. The Green Deal and the CAP 2023-2027 can be regarded as a period where agri-environmental regulations have grown considerably, thus supporting the view that the expansion of administrative and compliance requirements became a focal point for farmers’ dissatisfaction and protest mobilisation. However, with regard to increasing environmental compli-ance rules, we argue that this is not only an administrative but rather an affective burden manifested in feelings of uncertainty, loss of control, resentment, and misrecognition. We therefore propose an emotions-oriented account of administrative burden in agri-environmental policy. Building on this analytical framework, the empirical analysis draws on qualitative document analysis of communications, legislative proposals, and amendments adopted by the EU Commission be-tween December 2023 and December 2025 and compares these with press releases and other re-sponses from farmers' associations. The analysis finds that the EU co-legislators are implementing a set of flexibility and simplification measures that amount to what we conceptualise as ‘de-layering environmental regulation’—the partial dismantling of existing agri-environmental requirements without abandoning the overall agri-environmental framework. While this strategy might partially address the complaints by farmers it is not able to reduce political tension. By critically examining the de-layering in the simplification strategy in EU agri-environmental policy-making, this paper pro-vides a better understanding of the dynamics that cause the apparent political deadlock.