Agriculture is a major EU policy with implications that go far beyond the purely agricultural domain. While formerly considered to be mainly a cause of environmental degradation, agricultural policy is now regarded as one of the main sectors through which global food and environmental challenges can be tackled. It is also a key policy field in international trade negotiations, albeit one that often causes tensions and conflicts. The regulative diversity, divergent commercial interests, and trade disputes that characterize the relation between domestic agricultural policies and international trade lie at the root at such problems. Agricultural policy is particularly a significant bone of contention in transatlantic trade relations, impeding not only negotiations on the World Trade Organization, but also in the negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which have come to a complete standstill. This research project aims to explain the why and how of agricultural policy change in the EU and the US and the interaction of these changes with transatlantic trade relations. This will help policy makers understand the underlying problems and constraints and grants insights in how these could most effectively be solved, in order to tackle issues that are of major importance to society, such as environmental sustainability, food safety and food security.
On a theoretical level, the project seeks to enhance the recognition and application of an ideational approach in the study of Agricultural Policy and Trade, a research domain where the explanatory role of ideas (what actors think about what they do) and discourse (what actors say about what they think about what they do) has hitherto be underestimated. By applying a Discursive Institutionalist approach that combines a focus on actors, their ideas, their interests, and the institutions through which they seek to put their preferences forward, the project seeks to provide a more complete and convincing explanation of the why and how of the incremental processes of policy change that characterize agricultural policy.
The overall objectives of the project are thus to use theoretical innovation to gain more insights in existing agricultural policies in the EU and the US and their effect on transatlantic trade relations, in an effort to provide policy insights that will aid (EU) policy makers in the future.
