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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Exceptionalism
• ideas
• institutions
• interests
• policy change
• policy legacies

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the articles of this special issue were presented at the general conferences of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in Glasgow, 2014, Montreal, 2015 and Prague, 2016; and at the International Conference of Public Policy (ICPP) in Milan, 2015. We thank the Editors of this journal for support and helpful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Carsten Daugbjerg is a Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, Australia and a Professor in the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, email: [email protected].

Peter H. Feindt is Professor and Chair of the Strategic Communication Group in the Social Science Department of Wageningen University, The Netherlands, email: [email protected]. From October 2017, he is Professor of Agriculture and Food Policy at the Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute of Agricultural and Horticultural Sciences, Humboldt-University Berlin, Germany.

ORCID

Carsten Daugbjerg http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3869-6034

Peter H. Feindt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5978-5944