Late bloomer? Agricultural policy integration and coordination patterns in climate policies

ABSTRACT

The ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement demands action across all policy domains and even scrutinizes traditionally privileged ones, including agriculture. Is agriculture playing an increasingly important role in climate policies? Existing research argues that the insulated agricultural domain is opening up and becoming more multidimensional. Whether such developments are visible in the comparatively new climate domain, however, has not been systematically assessed yet. This article seeks to advance the academic debate on policy integration by examining the opposite direction of integration, i.e. the integration of agricultural components into climate policies. To assess coordination efforts, I investigate which ministries are represented in climate policies. I provide a global perspective by analyzing over 1000 climate policies from 1990 to 2017 and find that climate policies with mentions of agriculture are increasing. This is particularly true of EU and African countries, and since 2005. However, half of the data made no reference to agriculture and hardly ever mentioned agricultural ministries. I argue that agricultural ministries’ involvement in climate policymaking is crucial to the meaningful achievement of agri-climate objectives. The fragmented picture suggests that, while climate policies are becoming more multidimensional, both domains continue to co-exist rather than to merge into an entity.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural policy integration
• climate change
• climate policy
• coordination
• ministries
• policy integration

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for valuable comments by Jale Tosun, Robbert Biesbroek, Paolo Graziano, Fabrizio De Francesco, and Andreas Fleig, as well as research assistance by Friederike Bickmann, Christine Reiner and Lucas Leopold. Laurence Crumbie deserves credit for language editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Nicole M. Schmidt is a researcher at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her main research interests lie in the field of comparative EU and global climate change policy.

Notes

1 The Appendix gives an overview of all conducted interviews.

2 The Climate Change Laws of the World database is continuously updated. The data used here was retrieved in November 2017.

3 This study conducted keyword searches for ‘agri*’ and ‘food’ in Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. Employing the use of online translation services may result in inaccuracies. Their accuracy was checked by Native speakers.

4 Quote from an interviewee (INT 4, 2018).