The promises and pitfalls of consensus for agrifood reforms in times of polarisation : Lessons from the Strategic Dialogue on the future of European agriculture

Polarisation is problematic for reforms in European agrifood , as highlighted by the strong backlash to the transformative agenda of the Farm to Fork Strategy. In response, the European Commission seeks to inform new political priorities for agrifood through increased participation from stakeholders. One prominent example of this participation is the ‘Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture’. A nnounced in 2023 by the Ursula von der Leyen as a forum for depolarisation ’’, 29 prominent European agrifood stakeholders were mandated to formulate by consensus a desirable future for European agrifood , intended to inform the priorities of the 2024 2029 European Commission. Started in January 2024, the dialogue’s participants came to a 110 page ‘conceptual consensus’ published in September 2024 on a shared future for European agrifood. T he tenet of this consensual vision remained in important ways close to the Farm to Fork Strategy. Despite its apparent success, the dialogue’s legitimacy quickly dwindled. Excluded stakeholders critiqued t he dialogue’s secretive process and representativeness Furthermore, the Vision for European agrifood presented in February 2025 by the new European Commission has been critiqued for lacking cohesion with the dialogue’s recommendations. This observation invites a more critical look at the role of participatory initiatives like the Strategic Dialogue in broader attempts to reform (European) agrifood policy. In particular, we study how consensus is pursued in these deliberative yet polarised settings and how such deliberations can be designed to foster legitimate recommendations for policy reforms in agrifood. We focus on the Strategic Dialogue on the Future of EU Agriculture. Through 19 semi structured interviews with participants , invited experts, and the chair, we analyse how the Strategic Dialogue was organized over its eight months to identify key political design choices that were conducive to find consensus, while critically considering possible limitations in terms of its legitimacy and transformative potent ial to reform European agrifood.