From Policy Insider to Policy Outcast? Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles, EU Policymaking, and the EU's ‘Agri-Environment’ Regulation

Abstract

Recent studies of the role of lobby groups in European Union (EU) policymaking have drawn attention to the concept of 'multilevel governance* as u powerful explanatory tool in analysing how these organisations exert political influence on EU institutions. One of the longest standing of these groups is the Comite des Organisations Profcssionnclles Agricolcs (COPA). Until the mid-1980s, COPA was regarded as being remarkably successful in influencing the content and direction of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). More recently, however, commentators have noted a marked decline in COPA's influence, citing as evidence the organisation's abortive attempts to blunt the radical edge of the 1992 reform package of the Common Agricultural Policy. In this paper the authors use Grande's conception of multilevel governance to provide a thorough examination of why COPA carried little influence with the European Commission's Agriculture Directorate, Directorate-General VI (DGVI) during the 1992 reforms. An illustrative case study is presented of a minor though notable element of these reforms, the so-called 'agri-environment' regulation, EU 2078/92. In explaining COPA's slight effect on the final text of the regulation, Grande's notion of multilevel governance emphasises the eclectic positions adopted by COPA's constituent farming unions towards the regulation, and the complexities of a negotiating process transacted simultaneously with different EU institutions, each requiring the tailoring of specific lobbying strategics by COPA's secretariat. The authors conclude that the negative outcome of COPA's lobbying resulted not only from disarray among this organisation's national policy constituencies, but also from skillful countcrlobbying mounted by DGVI to prevent COPA from derailing the delicate CAP reform process.

Europeanisation and Its Discontents

“…Partly because of the dominance of functionalist accounts centred on federal and intergovernmental approaches to the EU, Europeanisation is often characterised as opaque, a binary distinction juxtaposing member-state and EU identities, denying the reality that political élites working within the EU continually shift within and between 'national', 'EU', 'organisational' and 'individual' agendas and objectives depending on their decision-making context (Clark and Jones, 1999;Jones and Clark, 2001). Most clearly, personnel in the EU institutions, including the European Commission and European Parliament, are drawn from the EU's 27 member-states and are obliged to hold multiple identities.…”

Policy formulation, governance shifts and policy influence: location and content in policy advisory systems

“…This line of thinking underlay early efforts to classify the various components of advice-giving as a kind of marketplace for policy ideas and information often seen, for example, as comprising three separate locational components: a supply of policy advice, its demand on the part of decision-makers and a set of brokers whose role it is to match supply and demand in any given conjuncture (Lindquist, 1998; Maloney et al, 1994; Clark and Jones, 1999; March et al, 2009). That is, advice systems were thought of as arrayed into three general “sets” of analytical activities with participants linked to the positions actors hold in the “market” for policy advice.…”

Free-riding on rent seeking—an empirical analysis

“…But the per-farmer COPA fee is low (see Table 2), we will expect to observe some level of free-riding on the membership fees. Nedergaard (2006) and Clark and Jones (1999) suggest COPA (Comté des Organisations Professionelles Agricoles de la CEE) as the principle European farm organization that lobbies for economic protection at the Commission (for a detailed description of COPA see Kohler-Koch 1992). It was founded in 1958 and by 2007 was made up of around 58 organizations of the 27 EU countries representing around 11 million farmers.…”

“…Historically the success of COPA was based on a close working relationship between the Director General of Agriculture for the Commission and COPA. It was based on mutual organizational interests, and it ensured that the policy adequately served national, regional and local farming interests (Clark and Jones 1999).…”