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.

Following an introductory discussion of the Treaty provisions on agriculture, this illuminating work examines the four regulations that currently govern the Common Agricultural Policy in the areas of Direct Payments, Rural Development, Finance, and the Common Organisation of the markets and considers their interpretation by the European Courts. It concludes with an astute assessment of the proposals for further reform, which will give Member States greater discretion in fine-tuning the principles of the policy established at European level to the particular characteristics of their agricultural sector.

The majority of recent publications on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union address current issues and specific applications. There is little available which attempts to increase understanding of the nature of existing policies, their development, intentions, problems and successes. The aim of this book is to improve knowledge and understanding of the ‘policy process’ and its application to the CAP, focussing on the principles of policy analysis. For while the details of agricultural and environmental policies evolve, the principles upon which they are based endure. The author uses economics as a basis for his exploration, as fairly simple economics holds the key to understanding many of the fundamental pressures to which agriculture and rural areas are subject. He explains the importance of the political and administrative context in which the process occurs, acknowledging the influence of environmental and sociological concerns. Such knowledge of the conceptual framework of the ‘policy process’ and its application to the CAP is essential for all concerned with agriculture and rural livelihoods, both within the European Union and in those countries trading with the EU. This includes both students and professionals. The book provides an understanding of these principles in terms of how and why policy changes, thus increasing the efficiency and efficacy of the process.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the Common Agricultural Policy which imposes high costs on taxpayers and consumers yet has proved very difficult to reform. Particular emphasis is placed on new developments affecting the shape of the CAP, including the outcome of the GATT Uruguay Round negotiations, Eastern enlargement, and developments in environmental policy. A distinctive feature of the book is the attention given to situating European agriculture within its global context and in relation to the food processing and agricultural supply industries.