![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that ‘ideas have their time’; it interprets the key notion of ambiguity, in the EU context, to mean institutional ambiguity; and it allows for spillovers between policy areas to be endogenous as well as exogenous. This affects the nature of the policy windows wherein policy entrepreneurship occurs. The adapted multiple streams model is used to analyse the 2005 EU sugar policy reform. Institutional ambiguity and endogenous spillovers are shown to create the conditions that enabled active policy entrepreneurship to lead, ultimately, to reform of this most resilient of policies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Robert Ackrill thanks the Leverhulme Trust for financial support (Research Fellowship RF/7/RFG/2007/0152); and the Centre for Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University, Brisbane, for kind hospitality during 2007. The authors thank the individuals interviewed during the course of this research for their time; participants at the 2008 Agricultural Economics Society Annual Conference for comments on initial ideas for this paper; and three anonymous referees and the journal editor for their comments on earlier versions. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
The revised second edition of Kingdon's 1984 work.
Initial political agreement was reached in November 2005, with amended legislation published in 2006. Following further changes in September 2007, only in 2009 did the Commission declare the reform process to be concluded (European Commission Citation2009).
See, inter alia, pages 125, 134, 138–9. On pages 146–7, where he says the entrepreneur can be an ‘insider’, this still ‘involves working closely with decisionmakers’.
The ‘CAP’, usually referred to in the singular, covers multiple commodities and instruments, with distinct agronomic, economic, political and policy characteristics. This section highlights key features of sugar, to help explain why EU reform was not forthcoming for so long; and identify the pressures for ‘nondecision’ (Bachrach and Baratz Citation1970) to be overcome to enable reform.
High prices and market protection suggest similarities between EU and US sugar policies. One notable difference is the place of sugar substitutes. The US is a sugar importer and a major corn producer – encouraging the development of sugar substitutes like high-fructose corn syrup. EU corn production is less, whilst subsidies for sugar users limit demand for sugar substitutes. US corn producers thus benefit from and support the US sugar policy.
See, inter alia, WTO Citation(2004).
We outline here the salient features of the case. All case documents are available on the WTO website at http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_status_e.htm (DS265 for Australia, DS266 for Brazil, DS283 for Thailand). See also Ackrill and Kay Citation(2009).
DS113, also available on the WTO website at http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/dispu_status_e.htm
Document WT/DS265/36 of 9 June 2006, available on the WTO website, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds265_e.htm
Council Regulation (EC) No 318/2006, of 20 February 2006, on the common organization of the markets in the sugar sector (Official Journal L58, 28 February 2006: 1–31).