Ideational power in CAP reforms: a story of change or continuity?

Over the past three decades, the traditionally closed policy community of agricultural decision-making have been challenged by external pressures for enlargement due to external crises, politicization strategies and changes in decision-making procedures. In the European context, new actors, ideas and interests have entered the debate on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), criticising existing measures and calling for a more sustainability-centered policy. However, the impact of enlargement and the extent of the integration of new actors is still unclear. The last reforms have seen only a partial integration of environmental concerns in the CAP objectives, while the core of the policy seems resistant to external pressures for change. The reform trajectory of the CAP remains puzzling, with increasingly multifunctional objectives co-existing with an exceptionalist core. Exceptionalist power structures and the strategic use of discourses to legitimize instruments can explain the struggle to fully integrate new interests and instruments. Yet, how power structures are maintained despite increasing criticisms remains to be explained. Building on the CAP ideational literature, this paper aims to understand how policy actors use dominant discourses to maintain or change power structures. Using a Discursive Institutionalist lens, this contribution seeks to expand the conceptualization of ideational power proposed by Carstensen and Schmidt (2016) by integrating it with the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). In particular, it aims to clarify a potential mechanism that connects different types of ideational power (through, over and in ideas). The study theorizes that policy actors engage in narrative strategies (power through) to either expand or contain the scope of the issue (scope of conflict - NPF), using narrative elements borrowed from existing discourses (power over) to maintain or disrupt existing power structures (power in). To test this argument, this paper adopts an in-depth case study of the interest groups’ narratives in the post-2022 CAP reform process. The focus on interest groups is justified by their role as fundamental actors in bringing in the policy process new ideas and interests. The study applies Discourse Network Analysis to position papers and statements issued during the latest reform (2017-2021). This methodology allows to reconstruct the ideational network of the CAP debate and to map how policy actors use dominant discourses to construct their narrative strategies. In turn, this shows how policy actors use discourses to maintain the existing power structures and how new actors attempt to challenge these structures to increase their influence in the process. Understanding the effect of ideas and discourses on power structures can provide interesting insights in explaining continuity and change in CAP reforms’ trajectories.