Transformative governance towards sustainable agri-food in the EU

This paper investigates the governance of agrifood in Europe and aims specifically to offer insights for further conceptualizing and operationalizing governance transformations towards sustainable solutions within the European Union (EU) with respect to agrifood. Agrifood constitutes an important EU policy, economically, politically, and socially. Agrifood closely links the environment (biophysical aspects) and societal aspects (access to food, consumption patterns etc). The agrifood sector is crucial for food security, employment, especially in rural areas, and exports in the EU. There are around 13 million businesses, employing 29million workers, while in 2022, food exports accounted for 7.6 % share of the EU's trade in goods (EPRS, 2023). At the same time, the agrifood sector is considered particularly vulnerable to climate change, as yields are affected significantly by extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, affecting farmers’ finances and food prices for consumers. However, agri-food production is an important source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), as it produces 11% of the EU GHG emissions. When other parts of the agrifood value chain sectors are added to primary food production, food processing, transportation, the retail industry, and food waste the GHG emissions account for 31% of the EU total emissions. These aspects demonstrate that important transformations are urgently needed.

The question that emerges is how can we maintain a sustainable agrifood system that contributes simultaneously to the economy, environment, and social cohesion? We suggest that for a sustainable agrifood system, transformations in the current EU top-down governance system are necessary. Instead, an integrated governance approach that allows coordination of the different sectors within the agrifood value chain, but also connects all levels of governance, from local to global, often referred to as ‘glocal’ (Chan, 2016; Kütting and Cerny, 2015), is necessary for sustainable transitions in the EU agrifood. During this process, administrations at all levels must have the capacity and scientific expertise to link and monitor the various processes, often acting as policy entrepreneurs and/or boundary-spanners, initiating collaborations and facilitating networks towards common policy solutions.

We focus on the EU agrifood area, that is highly industrialized and unsustainable and globally important. EU agrifood represents considerable diversities with respect to landscape, food cultures and traditions, production methods, and policies but falls under the common EU Food General Law and policy measures (IPES-Food, 2019). Although food policy has been mainly national responsibility and generally characterized by resilient governance, food crises and scandals in the 1990s demonstrated systemic and social imbalances that challenged the governance of food but also showed the need for transnational governance institutions and policy instruments. This resulted in the transfer of competences from the national governments to EU institutions and developed the EU food policy. These events acted as drivers of path breaking change instead of incremental national changes to adapt to the pre-existing governance system. Various formal and informal actors at both EU and national levels, the Commission, the agrifood sector, national governments, interest groups and NGOs contributed critically to the process, either coordinating, legislating and or exercising pressure and providing information and feedback, manifesting the need for transformation. This resulted in a dynamic Europeanisation process of food politics, policy and polity concerning the food area (Ladrech, 2010; Chatzopoulou, 2019; Chatzopoulou, 2020). In this process, the role of experts both in the EU and national administrative structures have been crucial in identifying the problems and developing policy responses. Nevertheless, the institutionalization of the EU food policy created lock-in effects, which impede fundamental changes in the governance process and policy outcomes. Instead, changes remain incremental, following pre-existing paths in the agrifood value chain from production to consumption. The paper aims to synthesize existing knowledge from the EU and provide relevant insights which can be useful for other food systems.

Within this context, this paper investigates how changes in governance can enable/inhibit transformations towards sustainability within the EU agri-food. Theoretically, the paper draws on transformative governance. The main claim is that for significant transitions to happen within the EU agri-food system, the governance system needs to include diverse actors and institutions, but also consider the power dynamics within the governance as well as the diverse practices and values of the actors. The existing top-down modes of governance are most often exclusive, characterized by imbalanced power struggles, neglecting the role of practices and values. Instead, combining both top-down and bottom-up governance understandings allows for incorporating the diverse practices and values of very different actors. This combination intensifies power struggles and value cleavages in governance. However, bringing together very diverse actors in governance also allows for exchange of new ideas and deliberations that lead to cognitive processes, and learning about potential alternative solutions that are more inclusive. Besides, such processes can facilitate transformations in governance and enable transitions towards sustainable agrifood systems. Empirically, the paper draws on various examples, such as the governance of food technology, food waste management and food social initiatives.

The paper demonstrates that the more the top-down and bottom-up approaches are combined the higher the possibility for fundamental transformations in governance towards sustainable agrifood systems and the opposite.