Grace Skogstad

Paradigm Shifts and Policy Networks: Cumulative Change in Agriculture*

This article presents an alternative trajectory to policy paradigm change to that outlined by Peter A. Halls social learning model, in which unsuccessful efforts by state officials to respond to policy failures and anomalies in the existing paradigm eventually trigger a broader, societal, political partisan debate about policy principles. From this society-wide contestation over policy goals, problems, and solutions, a new policy paradigm emerges. Drawing on the conceptual tools of policy feedback and policy networks, this article describes an alternative route to paradigm shift in which change is negotiated between state actors and group representatives. Discussions of change are largely confined to sectoral policy networks and the result is a more managed series of policy changes that culminate in a paradigm shift. This argument for a second, cumulative trajectory to paradigm shift is developed by examining agricultural policy change in three countries: the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Ideas, Paradigms and Institutions: Agricultural Exceptionalism in the European Union and the United States

The differing trajectory of agricultural policy reforms in the 1990s in the worlds two most important agricultural powers, the United States and the European Community/Union (EC/EU), can only be fully understood by appreciating the role that ideas play in policy outcomes. The idea of agricultural exceptionalism underwrote a paradigm of state assistance in the US and the EC/EU. By the mid-1980s, the state assistance paradigm was under stress, and subject to a number of anomalies in both the US and the EC. But while the paradigm was overthrown and replaced with a market liberal model in the US grain sector in the 1990s, it remained intact in the European Union. Explaining why agricultural exceptionalism and the state assistance paradigm has endured in the EU while it has withered in the US highlights three factors: the importance of the political institutional framework in locking in—or not—policy principles and instruments; the degree of fit of a sectoral policy paradigm with the broader societal ideational framework regarding appropriate relations between the state, the market, and the individual; and the capacity of a paradigm to adjust in the face of challenges and anomalies.

Internationalization and Canadian agriculture : policy and governing paradigms

In recent decades, Canadas agricultural industry, one of the worlds largest, has had to adjust to global trade developments such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization. Internationalization and Canadian Agriculture examines the patterns of continuity and change in Canadian agricultural policy making in important areas like farm income support programs, prairie grain marketing, supply management, animal and food product safety, and the regulation of genetically modified crops and foods. Arguing that the effects of internationalization have been mediated by Canadas political institutional framework, Grace Skogstad demonstrates how the goals and strategies of authoritative political actors in Canadas federal and parliamentary systems have been decisive to policy developments. Skogstad details the interaction between agriculture and the political economy of Canada, shows how international and domestic trade shape Canadian agricultural policies, and argues that while agricultural programs have changed, the post-war state assistance agricultural paradigm has persisted. A thorough political analysis and history of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Canadian agricultural policy and policy-making, Internationalization of Canadian Agriculture is an important contribution to political economy and public policy.

The WTO and Food Safety Regulatory Policy Innovation in the European Union

This article, first, weighs the impact of exogenous developments associated with the supranational regulation of food safety in the World Trade Organization (WTO) relative to internal pressures associated with food safety crises and the breakdown of the internal market on food safety regulatory reforms underway in the European Union (EU); and second, probes the capacity and propensity of the Commission to act as a policy entrepreneur, leveraging the two arenas – the domestic and global – to expedite policy reforms. It finds evidence of Commission policy entrepreneurship at home and abroad, but cautions that the former is constrained by a mediative policy style dictated by the EUs institutional and legal framework and exacerbated by food safety crises.

Who Governs? Who Should Govern?: Political Authority and Legitimacy in Canada in the Twenty-First Century

This article examines the contemporary basis of legitimate governance in Canada by identifying and documenting four different bases of political authority: statecentred, market-based, expert and popular authority. The co-existence of these competing bases of authority, traced to cultural shifts and developments associated with globalization, creates conflicting domestic and international norms of procedural and substantive legitimacy. The article argues that effective and legitimate governing in Canada requires greater incorporation of elements of popular authority, and reform, not abandonment, of state-cen-

Neo‐liberalism, policy networks, and policy change: Agricultural policy reform in Australia and Canada

Developments favouring the liberalisation and globalisation of economic exchange and increasingly rigid constraints on domestic fiscal policy have provided support for neo‐ liberal policy ideas. Neolibcralism challenges the logic of embedded liberalism that underscored trade multilateralism in the post‐second world war period, and the exclusion of sectors like agriculture from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Focusing on agricultural policy, the article examines the pace and extent to which neo‐liberal ideas have been able to gain hold and displace non‐liberal domestic policies in Australia and Canada. The article shows that neo‐liberal ideas have been more easily translated into domestic policy change in Australia than in Canada. A significant part of the explanation for this cross‐national difference is found in the differing domestic political‐institutional arrangements, including federalism, bureaucratic arrangements, the presence or absence of a neo‐liberal epistemic community, and trie st...

Globalization and Public Policy: Situating Canadian Analyses

Globalization and its implications for domestic policy making are not new issues for Canadians. Indeed, the countrys political economy has long made Canadians highly vulnerable to developments beyond their borders. Dependent on foreign trade and investment, Canadas economy has become deeply integrated into the American economy and, for selected primary commodities, the international economy. Relatedly, Canadian governments have been long–standing supporters of multilateralism and international regulatory frameworks like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), now the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Common Agricultural Policy: Continuity and Change

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU) is a unique agricultural policy world-wide. When it was devised in the late 1950s and its objectives enshrined in the Treaty of Rome, it constituted ‘the first successful attempt to create a single policy for an economic sector, implemented in a unified manner over the territory of a number of independent states, and which governed their relationships not only with one each other but also with the rest of the world’ (Fennell 1997, 1). For many years, its status as the only common European Community policy governed by EC institutions put it at the heart of European integration. Today the CAP is not the only common EC/EU policy. Even while it remains the sole instance of a regionally integrated agricultural policy, the CAP no longer embodies the same degree of cross-national harmonization of agricultural policy among EC/EU member states that it once did. It has undergone policy reforms in the past two decades and these reforms have spawned a host of questions. What has caused the CAP to reform? Have factors endogenous to the EU been especially important drivers of change or have exogenous pressures from trade competitors and in the form of international trade agreements under the rubric of the World Trade Organization (WTO) been the major catalyst of reforms? How path-breaking are CAP reforms? Are they consistent with founding CAP goals or do they encompass new ideas about agriculture’s place in the economy and society? And what are the consequences of agricultural policy reforms: for European farmers, consumers and taxpayers; for European ‘public goods’, such as environmental sustainability and preservation of rural communities and landscapes; and for third parties outside the EU?

Canadian Federalism, Internationalization and Quebec Agriculture: Dis-Engagement, Re-Integration?

The two faces of relations between Quebec and Canadian agriculture have been shaped by Canadas federal system and developments in the international trading environment. The first face, the disengagement of Quebecs farm community from the Canadian federal system, can be traced to the Quebec governments expansionist agricultural policy, the diminished federal expenditure role in Quebec agriculture, and the fissiparous effects of the negotiation of international trade agreements. The second face of good working relationships in the national supply-managed sectors is linked to flexible, national corporatist decision-making structures which provide a vital social glue linking Quebecs dairy sector with that outside Quebec. Restructuring the Canada-Quebec relationship in agriculture by either giving Quebec sole jurisdiction for agriculture or integrating Quebec agriculture more fully into the federation must be assessed in the context of internationalizing pressures and fiscal restraints.