The Role of Agricultural Subsystems in Implementing Agroclimatic Insurance : Perspectives from France and Senegal

While research on climate policies has increased, the political and theoretical dimensions of climate change adaptation remain relatively underexplored. One reason for this gap is that adaptation studies have often focused on adaptation plans and policy instruments through formal and comparative approaches (Henstra 2016; Biesbroek 2021; Biesbroek et al. 2010). As a result, they have tended to overlook the contextualized analysis of national political dynamics shaping the implementation of adaptation policies and instruments. Some studies have sought to address this limitation (Boutroue, Bourblanc, et al. 2022; Hrabanski et al. 2025; Boutroue 2025; Milhorance et al. 2021; Hrabanski and Montouroy 2022; Montouroy et al. 2022), notably by emphasizing the role of policy subsystems in the implementation of adaptation policies and instruments. This paper builds on this body of work by adopting an instrument-based approach to analyse the role of policy subsystems in the implementation of climate change adaptation policies. In this respect, the choice of the agricultural sector is particularly relevant, as it is shaped by specific and institutionalized power relations. Indeed, studies on agriculture—especially in France and Europe—have highlighted phenomena of co-management, as well as forms of sectoral exceptionalism or post-exceptionalism, underscoring the importance of historically entrenched power relations between agricultural professional organizations and public authorities. Moreover, agriculture is a sector that is particularly vulnerable and exposed to climate change. Among the instruments designed to support the adaptation of agriculture to climate change, this paper focuses on the implementation of climate insurance schemes in two national contexts. Climate insurance encompasses a range of schemes that share two main characteristics: they aim to protect agriculture against climate-related risks that are intensifying as a result of climate change (such as droughts or crop losses), and they are explicitly framed by states as instruments of agricultural climate change adaptation. The paper examines climate insurance schemes in France and Senegal. This comparative strategy seeks to shed light on a case from the Global North through experiences from the Global South, in order to denaturalize the European case, which is often treated as a benchmark of normality in political science (Chakrabarty 2009; Coulon 1997). Accordingly, this paper addresses the following research question: what role do agricultural policy subsystems play in the implementation of a flagship instrument for agricultural climate change adaptation—namely, climate insurance, in France and in Senegal? . By providing a fine-grained contextualization of the implementation of agricultural climate change adaptation instruments, this paper contributes to theoretical debates on the politics of adaptation implementation. In particular, it emphasizes the central role of dominant actors within sectoral policy subsystems in shaping the political dynamics of adaptation instrument implementation. Indeed, the analysis of sectoral subsystems remains crucial to understanding the implementation of adaptation policies, which largely depend on how they are integrated within specific sectors (Boutroue, Hrabanski, et al. 2022; Biesbroek 2021). This reaffirms the importance of analysing climate adaptation policies in context, beyond the extensive literature devoted to the formal and paper-based realities of climate adaptation plans (Namugumya 2021).