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Roederer-Rynning, Christilla --- "Informal governance in the Common Agricultural Policy" [2004] ELECD 32; in Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona (eds), "Informal Governance in the European Union" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: Informal Governance in the European Union

Editor(s): Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843763512

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Informal governance in the Common Agricultural Policy

Author(s): Roederer-Rynning, Christilla

Number of pages: 16

Extract:

10. Informal governance in the Common
Agricultural Policy
Christilla Roederer-Rynning

INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how formal and informal aspects of
governance have shaped the development of the Common Agricultural Policy
(CAP) since the late 1950s. The task entails determining the role of these
factors not only in the institutionalization of the CAP in the 1960s, but also in
the slow re-institutionalization of this policy along new lines in the 1990s.1
A key premise of this study is that European farm politics underwent an
`agrarian turn' in the 1960s. It is arresting that the CAP today conjures up all
the flaws of an anachronistically productivist project, for the early formula-
tions of the CAP revealed the concern of its architects to include a variety of
societal interests and to use structural policy as a tool of modernization. The
`incongruous' character (Fennell 1997, p. 20), until not so long ago, of the
injunctions of early European policy-makers is a good indicator of this `agrar-
ian turn'. An attentive reading of the Treaty of Rome of 1957 and of the
proceedings of the Stresa Conference in June 1958 suggests that early
Europeanists regarded agriculture `as an integral part of the economy and as
an essential factor in social life',2 urged their successors to draw consumer
concerns into farm policy-making3, and even recommended a generous
endowment of the structural dimension of agricultural policy.4 Although the
terminology was often evasive and did not ...