Transforming Food and Agricultural Policy

Post-exceptionalism in public policy

Carsten Daugbjerg, Peter Feindt

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351118286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du développement

Western democratic welfare states often featured sectoral governance arrangements where governments negotiated policy with sectoral elites, based on shared ideas and exclusive institutional arrangements. Food and agriculture policy is widely considered an extreme case of compartmentalized and 'exceptionalist' policy-making, where sector-specific policy ideas and institutions provide privileged access for sectoral interest groups and generate policies that benefit their members. In the last two decades, policy exceptionalism has been under pressure from internationalization of policy-making, increasing interlinkage of policy areas and trends towards self-regulation, liberalization and performance-based policies. This book introduces the concept of 'post-exceptionalism' to characterize an incomplete transformation of exceptionalist policies and politics which preserves significant exceptionalist features. Post-exceptional constellations of ideas, institutions, interests and policies can be complementary and stable, or tense and unstable. Food and agriculture policy serves as an example to illustrate an incomplete transformation towards a more open, contested and networked politics. Chapters on agricultural policy-making in the European Union and the United States, the politics of food in Germany and the United Kingdom, transnational organic standard setting and global food security debates demonstrate how 'postexceptionalism' helps to understand the co-existence of transformation and path dependency in contemporary public policies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.

Post-exceptionalism in public policy: transforming food and agricultural policy

Carsten Daugbjerg

and Peter H. Feindt

ABSTRACT
Framing the special issue on the transformation of Food and Agricultural Policy, this article introduces the concept of post-exceptionalism in public policies. The analysis of change in agri-food policy serves as a generative example to conceptualize current transformations in sectoral policy arrangements in democratic welfare states. Often these arrangements have been characterized by an exceptionalist ideational framework that legitimizes a sector’s special treatment through compartmentalized, exclusive and producer-centered policies and politics. In times of internationalization of policy-making, increasing interlinkage of policy areas and trends towards self-regulation, liberalization and performance-based policies, policy exceptionalism is under pressure to either transform or give way to (neo-)liberal policy arrangements. Post-exceptionalism denotes a partial transformation of exceptionalist ideas, institutions, interest constellations and policy instruments. It reflects the more complex, open, contested and fluid nature of contemporary policy fields that nevertheless still maintain their policy heritage. Discussing stability, the authors distinguish between complementary and tense post-exceptionalism.

Introduction

The Western democratic welfare states of the twentieth century were often marked by sectoral governance arrangements where governments negotiated policy with sectoral élites. Since the 1980s, such arrangements have experienced increasing pressure from governments who wanted to exercise a higher degree of control over policy outcomes and the efficiency of public expenditure (Capano 2011; Capano et al. 2015; Richardson 2017). While these relatively closed and self-referential modes of governance and the attempts to submit them to the discipline of performance review and financial discipline have received much attention, one dimension of struggle has not been systematically explored: the tension between ideas that claim the need for special treatment for a sector, or what we term policy exceptionalism, and the generalized ideas of market-oriented and performance-based steering often associated with neoliberalism. In this special issue, we take agricultural policy as an example to develop the concept of policy post-exceptionalism which characterizes the compromise outcome of struggles between policy exceptionalism and attempted (neo-) liberalization.

Over the years, political scientists and policy scholars have repeatedly taken a significant interest in studying agricultural-policy making as a generative empirical example in the theoretical development of policy studies. What made the agricultural-policy sector attractive was that it could be considered an extreme case of a compartmentalized and ‘exceptionalist’ policy-making process. The agricultural-policy sector was characterized by a distinct set of sector-oriented institutions and ideas, well-organized and well-resourced sectoral interest groups, substantial government intervention in the market, and the potential for a significant redistribution of economic assets from the whole population (through taxes and higher consumer prices) to a relatively small group of producers and landowners. Consequently, these studies have contributed to theoretical developments in the policy and political sciences within a number of research fields that were concerned with the explanation of policy outcome, policy stability and change. These include: interest groups (e.g., Lowi 1969; Olson 1965; Sheingate 2003), government-interest group relations (e.g., Browne 1988; Jordan et al. 1994; Marsh and Smith 2000; Smith 1993), the role of ideas and paradigms in explaining policy change and stability (Coleman et al. 1996; Feindt 2010; Skogstad 1998), policy feedback and path dependency (Coleman and Grant 1998; Daugbjerg 2003; Hooghe and Oser 2016; Kay 2003; Zhu and Lipsmeyer 2015) and more recently, policy layering (Chou 2012; Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2016; Feindt and Flynn 2009; Jackson and Deeg 2012) and internationalization of public policy (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009, 2015; Skogstad 2008). Indeed, some of the classic studies on these concepts were grounded in agricultural policy, and often examples were drawn from this area to illustrate theoretical points (see Daugbjerg and Swinbank [2012] for a review of the literature).

The new developments in the food and agriculture sector pose new questions about the nature of policy-making and how we should approach this analytically, not only in the food and agriculture sector, but also in other policy sectors with exceptionalist features. In particular internationalization of policy-making, the growing and new role of self- and co-regulation (which is particularly sensitive in the food sector), concerns about policy efficiency and performance and the interlinkage with other policy domains, such as the rising environmental state (Duit et al. 2016), challenge existing policy arrangements.

Against this background, we propose policy post-exceptionalism as a diagnostic concept to characterize simultaneous continuity and change in a policy arena. Policy (post-)exceptionalism is unavoidably policy specific but has some more general features. Post-exceptionalism denotes a partial departure from compartmentalized, exclusive and exceptionalist policies and politics which, however, preserves some exceptionalist features and has not led to a complete transformation to market-oriented and performance-based policies. It is an incomplete transformation of ideas, institutions, interest constellations and policies with a significant legacy from past policy.

Through an analysis of food and agricultural policy, this article defines policy exceptionalism, reviews its challenges since the 1980s, introduces the concept of ‘post-exceptionalism’ and characterizes its developments over the last two decades. Based on the key findings of the contributions to this special issue, we discuss the stability of post-exceptionalist arrangements and argue for the broader value of the concept for understanding change in other policy sectors as well.

Defining policy exceptionalism

Exceptionalism is a political belief system that assigns special status to a group, a sector or a country, often on the basis of a historical narrative, to justify special treatment, to claim the validity of special rules or to mobilize group pride or particular efforts for a group’s alleged mission (cf. Lipset 1997). Apart from agricultural policy, exceptionalism is a rarely used concept in public-policy studies. The notion of policy exceptionalism describes the special treatment of a sector by governments and international organizations and the belief system that provides cognitive justification and political legitimation. The concept was introduced by Grant (1995) and juxtaposed to attempts to liberalize agricultural markets in line with more general trends towards market liberalism. It was deployed by Skogstad (1998) to explain different policy reforms across the Atlantic in the 1990s and has informed later discussions about paradigm shifts in agriculture policy. Policy exceptionalism is likely also to exist in other policy sectors that are significant for the welfare state, such as housing, energy, higher education, health and care, or pensions, to support calls for, e.g., price controls, producer privileges or state-backed modes of provision. Abstracting from the earlier works on agricultural exceptionalism, we understand policy exceptionalism to comprise four dimensions: ideas; institutions; interests; and policy (instruments and implementation). The core of the concept is a set of exceptionalist ideas which shape and legitimize compartmental institutions that provide a dedicated policy space for a policy community to adopt and implement policy instruments and programs that serve their interests and comply with their ideas. We briefly discuss each dimension in turn, using agricultural exceptionalism to illustrate the broader concept.

Ideas

Public policies are shaped by cognitive and normative beliefs which are communicated through policy ideas that provide meaning to situations (Béland and Cox 2011) and set standards for appropriate behavior and desirable outcomes (Skogstad and Schmidt 2011: 8–9). Exceptionalist ideas explain the unique nature of a particular sector which renders it unsuitable and/or inappropriate to be governed by market forces and highlight how the sector contributes to broader societal values. Agricultural exceptionalism, for example, is based on the assumption that agriculture is different from other economic sectors in modern societies and requires and deserves special policy treatment for three reasons. First, the claim that unlike other sectors, agricultural producers are faced with unpredictable natural risks: unstable weather, changing climatic factors, unpredictable plant and animal diseases and pests impact on farms and frequently result in sharp fluctuations in market prices, and thus farm incomes, often exacerbated by the ensuing adjustments because collectively agricultural markets tend to over-react to price oscillations (the proverbial pork cycle). Second, it has often been argued that in a growing economy farm incomes may be chronically low (‘the farm income problem’). Low income elasticity of food demand implies that an increase in consumer income will only result in limited growth in demand for farm products. To keep up with rising incomes in the rest of the economy, farmers will have to expand production. If not enough farmers are able and willing to exit the farm industry and earn more elsewhere, their income may be depressed (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009). Therefore, as Skogstad (1998: 468) emphasizes: ‘The first rationale for treating agriculture as an exceptional sector is tied to the specific interests and needs of farmers.’ The third defining rationale of agricultural exceptionalism is that the farming sector provides an indispensable contribution to the national interest, in particular food security (Skogstad 1998: 468) and the welfare state, i.e., employment, income and safe and affordable food. Occasionally, agriculture or farmers are also linked to values of the polity, e.g., when rural farm communities are presented as models of local grassroots democracy or democracy more generally (Griswold [1948] 1952) or agriculture is stylized as the embodiment of national values (Browne et al. 1992). A variation is to claim a special position of farmers in rural communities or society at large (e.g., the policy-mission statement of the German government stresses that family farms ‘are of great importance for the development of rural regions and for social cohesion’, BMEL 2015: 8). Overall, the agricultural exceptionalist view holds that their special nature means that agricultural production and markets, if left unregulated, will fail to deliver a secure and safe food supply at stable and reasonable food prices, which will lead to decline of farm incomes and possibly rural communities and, more recently, natural resources and ecosystems.

Institutions

Exceptionalist ideas co-develop with a set of institutions and often provide the blueprint for tailor-made institutional design (Blyth 2002) that reflects the perceived uniqueness of the policy sector and at the same time serves to reproduce the exceptionalist ideas (cf. Béland and Cox 2011: 9). In agriculture, the perceived distinctive character of the sector is used to justify institutional compartmentalization, which in turn has helped to further entrench exceptionalist ideas (Grant 1995: 168). In most industrialized countries, until fairly recently, special ministries have been dedicated to serving agriculture (Halpin 2005: 10). At the political level, the ministers often defined their role as the minister for agriculture rather the minister of agriculture (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009: 9). At the administrative level, special administrative bodies integrating farm associations have been formed to administer agricultural policies. These often led to the formation of closed networks of agricultural civil servants and farm-group officials, resulting in a compartmentalized and corporatist policy style. The core of the compartment is often surrounded by a plethora of auxiliary and satellite institutions, such as extension services, agricultural colleges and semi-state chambers of agriculture that tie farmers into the dominant policy and thinking (Rieger 1996). The compartmentalized sectoral institutions exercise ideational power through persuasion, exclusion of alternative ideas or by shaping the terms of debate (Feindt 2017).

Interests

Exceptionalist ideas and institutions shape the formation of interests and the patterns of interaction between government and interest groups, in particular by affecting the distribution of policy costs and benefits. Exceptionalist policies tend to provide benefits to specific groups while costs are dispersed to broad groups, such as consumers and taxpayers, who find it difficult to counter-mobilize. The beneficiaries are likely to develop a strong interest in upholding compartmentalized institutions which give them a privileged position to defend the exceptionalist policy. For example, agricultural exceptionalism supports the interests of agricultural producers but also benefits other groups, such as landowners, suppliers of agricultural inputs, financial institutions, food processors and retailers. Agricultural exceptionalism can be linked to the promotion of specific farming models, typically a productivist focus on high-input and high-yield agriculture (Clunies-Ross et al. 1994). For political success, the exceptionalist ideas must resonate with broader audiences and need to be adopted by influential political parties (Roederer-Rynning 2003).

Policy

Exceptionalist policy ideas typically precipitate in exceptional policy instruments which are designed to regulate or mitigate market forces and to achieve specific policy outcomes. Exceptionalist instruments are often sector specific and therefore do not usually travel easily across policy sectors. For example, exceptionalist agricultural policies regulate domestic production through a set of specific instruments, such as intervention buying by state agencies to stabilize producer prices, farm input subsidies, production-linked direct payments, production quota to limit surplus production and maintain price levels or programs to enhance predefined environmental and conservation practices (Greer 2005). To protect farmers from international competition exceptionally high tariffs have been imposed on imports while agricultural exports have received various types of direct and indirect subsidies (Daugbjerg and Swinbank 2009).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Post-exceptionalism in public policy: transforming food and agricultural policy
• 2. Post-exceptional politics in agriculture: an examination of the 2013 CAP reform
• 3. Environmental policy integration in the EU’s common agricultural policy: greening or greenwashing?
• 4. Party support for post-exceptionalism in agri-food politics and policy: Germany and the United Kingdom compared
• 5. Post-exceptionalism and corporate interests in US agricultural policy
• 6. ‘Feeding 9 billion people’: global food security debates and the productionist trap
• 7. Global organic agriculture policy-making through standards as an organizational field: when institutional dynamics meet entrepreneurs
• 8. The resilience of paradigm mixes: food security in a post-exceptionalist trade regime
• Index