Progress and backlash in agri-food transformation policy: what role for organised interests?

Despite the need for substantive sustainability transformations in food systems is acknowledged broadly among scientists, farmers, policy-makers, agri-food companies and NGOs, it appears very difficult to enact change via agri-food transformation policies. In the EU, for instance, the current Vision for Agriculture and Food largely dismisses the ambitious targets set out in the earlier Farm to Fork strategy and wider Green Deal of EU, shifting the focus now more prominently to the availability and stability as means of ensuring food security. Visible are farmers’ protests and opposition from right-wing political parties. Less visible, however, is what happens behind the scenes, i.e., lobby and other strategies employed by organised interests such as farmer unions, large agri-food corporations, labour unions but also environmental NGOs. This paper provides a first attempt to systematically map the influence of organised interests on agri-food transformation policy by (a) defining the key concepts of ‘organised interest’, ‘strategies’, ‘influence’, and ‘coalitions’ taking into account their heterogenous characters; (b) providing a classification of possible strategies, drawing from various bodies of literature, including environmental and agricultural politics, political economy of food, agri-food transition studies and transition management; (c) based on a scoping review, present empirical evidence of strategies employed in practice by organised interests to influence agri-food transformation policies (including their effects as well as what counter-responses the strategies have met by governments and other actors); and (d) identify knowledge gaps and interesting case studies as basis for a research agenda to further our understanding of the role of organised interests and coalitions in progress and backlash in agri-food transformation policy.