Co-Evolving Ideas in Discursive Interactions: the Case of Transforming EU Soil Policy

The evolution of the European Union's (EU) soil policy underwent significant changes, from aiming at comprehensive regulation through a Soil Framework Directive, to merely establishing a Soil Monitoring Directive with focus on monitoring and managing contaminated sites. This trajectory exemplifies how status-quo oriented interpretations capture and diminish transformation-oriented ideas in agri-food systems. Ideational contestation focused on soil status assessment, questions of subsidiarity, and heterogeneous baselines in natural environments. This paper aims to explain the trajectory of soil policy through an ideational lens, with specific attention to the functions of the concept of 'soil health' in agenda-setting, problem formulation, and solution development. The study adopts a discursive institutionalist lens (Schmidt, 2008, 2010, 2012) to examine the role of ideas in policy processes. We examine how ideas on soil degradation and protection evolved through the interplay of coordinative and communicative discourses (Schmidt, 2008, 2010, 2012), involving governmental actors, interest groups and civil society. We reconstruct how discursive interactions shaped problem understandings over time, and their effects on policy outcomes. The study amends the literature with reflections on co-evolutionary relationships between coordinative and communicative discourses. With explaining-outcome process-tracing (Beach & Pedersen, 2013; Nullmeier, 2021), we analyse around 350 key documents from the EU Commission, Parliament, and civil society organisations, such as procedural files, position papers, interservice consultation documents and speeches at critical moments in the evolution of soil policy towards the adopted Soil Monitoring Directive. A deductive-inductive coding process in MAXQDA serves to understand the reciprocal evolution of coordinative and communicative discourses. The analysis reveals that the dominant problem understanding evolved from a focus on transboundary soil degradation to a more holistic emphasis on 'soil health’, including normative ideas about the role of soils in ecosystem services. This shift was facilitated by the interplay between coordinative and communicative discourses. Newer actors rallying around the EU Commission exerted power through ideas (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016) by employing the concept of soil health to build a broad consensus on the importance of soil for society. The climate movement and the EU Green Deal as concomitant exogenous events supported such ideational efforts and enabled a new attempt at instituting a comprehensive EU soil policy framework. However, status-quo oriented actors attenuated initial soil policy ambitions and thus narrowed the space for transformative innovations. Their power over ideas, coupled with exogenous events related to the Russian attack on Ukraine, weakened the initially ambitious policy proposals. Nevertheless, the Soil Monitoring Directive as policy outcome reflects both newer actors’ and incumbent actors’ problem understandings of soil degradation. This suggests that actors’ agency and ideational power played a decisive role, both in opening up space for transformative change and limiting it. Yet, their success was likewise determined by exogenous events, as policy ideas co-evolved between coordinative and communicative discourses. The findings contribute to analysis of the effects of EU-level policy discourses on EU-level regulation as a potential mechanism to stimulate sustainability-oriented, post-productivist innovation in Europe’s agri-food systems. References Beach, D., & Pedersen, R. B. (2013). Process-tracing methods: Foundations and guidelines. University of Michigan Press. Carstensen, M. B., & Schmidt, V. A. (2016). Power through, over and in ideas: conceptualizing ideational power in discursive institutionalism. Journal of European Public Policy, 23(3), 318–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2015.1115534 Nullmeier, F. (2021). Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing. Campus Verlag. https://doi.org/10.12907/978-3-593-44400-0 Schmidt, V. A. (2008). Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science, 11(1), 303–326. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.060606.135342 Schmidt, V. A. (2010). Taking ideas and discourse seriously: explaining change through discursive institutionalism as the fourth ‘new institutionalism’. European Political Science Review, 2(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S175577390999021X Schmidt, V. A. (2012). Discursive Institutionalism: Scope, dynamics, and philosophical underpinnings. In F. Fischer & H. Gottweis (Eds.), The Argumentative Turn Revisited: Public Policy as Communicative Practice (pp. 85–113). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395362-004