Carsten Daugbjerg

• PhD (political science)
• Professor (Full) at University of Copenhagen

The Best Practice Book from the EFFECT project is a compendium that shows insights about Agri-Environmental Schemes (AES) in Europe. EFFECT has dug deep into the world of AES, by looking at how these plans perform, what makes them work economically, and if farmers find them acceptable. It has studied nine real-life cases across Europe to learn valu...

In response to the challenges posed by the fragmentation of habitats and loss of native biodiversity, climate change adaptation and mitigation, diverse agri-environmental measures have been initiated across the European Union (EU) with the aim of fostering agricultural ecosystem service delivery. Previous studies adopting a governance perspective h...

Promoting organic farming is the ultimate strategy to reduce the use of synthetic pesticides. Denmark and Sweden have introduced measures to increase organic consumption as a policy strategy to expand the organic farm sector. Both countries have introduced public procurement programmes for organic food in public sector institutions. While the Danis...

This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to wh...

This book presents 23 in-depth case studies of successful public policies and programmes in Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. Each chapter tells the story of the policy’s origins, aims, design, decision-making and implementation processes, and assesses in which respects—programmatically, process-wise, politically and over time—and to wh...

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Abstract This paper employs the Institutional Analysis and Developm...

There has been revived scholarly interest in policy capacity recently. While it is widely assumed that capacity is important for policy performance, it is difficult to separate its impact from the effect of policy instruments to establish whether capacity can produce an independent and positive effect on target group behavior in relation to achievi...

Eco‐schemes are set to play an important role in the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) post‐2022 for the delivery of environmental and climate benefits and enhanced animal welfare. This article surveys current plans for the design of eco‐schemes in fifteen European Union Member States. The number of eco‐scheme measures to be offered...

This article departs from the assumption that the challenge of putting the Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F) into action stems from the broader challenge of attaining cross‐sectoral policy integration. Policy integration has been part of the EU's policy approach for a long time and has predominantly been achieved in the form of environmental policy integ...

This article seeks to critique and extend recent work in the policy sciences, by Maor in particular, on disproportionate policy making—including policy overreaction and underreaction. While the disproportionate policy making thesis does help address assumptions that something is amiss in the policy process by capturing an imbalance between policy p...

With the proliferation of private regulation of food safety, governments have shown interests in engaging private schemes as co‐regulators. This raises the issue of accountability in private schemes; that is holding the bodies auditing the standards accountable. The ability to do so affects the integrity of private regulatory schemes. Holding audit...

The scope and intensity of policy transfer has increased in recent years as developing countries have drawn on public sector reform programmes based on new public management practices originally designed in western democracies. However, there is mounting evidence that to be successful, reform programmes must be adapted to local contexts. This artic...

In this article, we challenge two assumptions embedded in many ex-ante analyses of environmental policy instruments. Firstly, it is often assumed that target groups in environmental policy are homogeneous and thus can be expected to respond to policy instruments in a similar manner. Secondly, individual target group members are expected to respond...

Danish agricultural and fisheries policy

The food sovereignty movement arose as a challenge to neoliberal models of agriculture and food and the corporatization of agriculture, which is claimed to have undermined peasant agriculture and sustainability. However, food sovereignty is an ambiguous idea. Yet, a few countries are institutionalizing it. In this paper, we argue that food sovereig...

The policy feedback literature was initially concerned with explaining how positive feedback could lead to self-reinforcing policy trajectories. More recently, policy scholars have devoted more attention to negative feedbacks which can result in self-undermining policy trajectories. This article moves beyond these two well-known pathways to policy...

Politicisation can be a strategy in which reform advocates use new ideas with coalition magnet attributes to engage a broad range of actors in setting the agenda for policy reform. Comparing the cases of Ecuador and Nepal, the article shows that the generally appealing but ambiguous idea of food sovereignty is a coalition magnet. Through politicisa...

The development of a comparative food policy research agenda has been hampered by the dependent variable problem of how to delineate the policy field. Through a concise literature review, we show that the existing literature has conceptualised food policy as policy outputs, institutional orders, or discursive constructs. Focusing on the policy outp...

This chapter focuses on the policy capacity of interest groups. More specifically, it explores which types of policy capacities interest groups may develop. It is widely acknowledged that interest groups can play key roles in the policy process, in particular if they have generated their own capacities through the possession of a number of ‘policy...

This paper argues that a policy regime based on a paradigm mix may be resilient when challenged by changing power balances and new agendas. Controversies between the actors can be contained within the paradigm mix as it enables them to legitimize different ideational positions. Rather than engaging in conflict over the foundation of the regime, the...

Framing the special issue on the transformation of Food and Agricultural Policy, this article introduces the concept of post-exceptionalism in public policies. The analysis of change in agri-food policy serves as a generative example to conceptualize current transformations in sectoral policy arrangements in democratic welfare states. Often these a...

Food security has emerged as a relatively new policy issue in agricultural policy making in developed countries. This policy problem is addressed within an institutional landscape in which agricultural ideas and institutions are well-established. In this article, food security policy making in Australia and Norway is compared. In Australia, agricul...

The transfer of regulatory authority to international organisations can initiate domestic policy reform. The internationalisation process can be a one-off transfer of authority to international institutions or an ongoing process. In the latter situation, the level of internationalisation may be gradually increased by expanding the regulatory scope...

Despite several generations of literature on governance and the instruments involved, micro-foundational frameworks remain lacking to describe and model the positive, negative and confused feedback dynamics within any set of governance arrangements. In response, this article addresses the argument common in various historical accounts of a shift fr...

The study of policy reform has tended to focus on single-stage reforms taking place over a relatively short period. Recent research has drawn attention to gradual policy changes unfolding over extended periods. One strategy of gradual change is layering, in which new policy dimensions are introduced by adding new policy instruments or by redesignin...

This article develops a heuristic for comparative governance analysis. The heuristic depicts four network types by combining network structure with the state’s capacity to metagovern. It suggests that each network type produces a particular combination of input and output legitimacy. We illustrate the heuristic and its utility using a comparative s...

The hungry poor shall weep no more,for the food they can never earn;There are tables spread, ev’ry mouth be fed,for the world is about to turn.Rory Cooney, Canticle of the TurningIntroductionSince the food price spike of 2008 there have been multiple reports on the challenges of feeding more than 9 billion people by 2050. The low end of the project...

A contested issue in the international debate on food security is the role of trade in safeguarding food security at the global and national level. This paper explores how the issue of food security and trade has been discursively framed in two international organizations, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the General Agreement on Tra...

The transfer of some decision-making authority from the domestic to the supranational arena as a result of the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 potentially changed domestic policy dynamics. The WTO agreements reflect the trade policy concerns addressed in the Uruguay Round in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This article a...

In this article we examine the transnational governance of sustainable biofuels and its coexistence with the WTO trade regime. The analysis of how the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is shaping transnational biofuel governance shows deep and mutual dependence between public and private. The EU relies on a private system of compliance and verifi...

Symposium including three articles: Ponte, S. and C. Daugberg 'Biofuel sustainability and the formation of transnational hybrid governance' Henriksen, L.F. 'The global network of biofuel sustainability standard-setters' Laurent, B. 'The politics of European agencements: constructing a market of sustainable biofuels'

Eco-labels have an import role in promoting green consumption since most eco-labelled products are credence goods, implying that the valued process attributes they contain are not observable to the consumer even after purchase or consumption. Therefore, the consumers rely heavily on eco-labels as a reassurance that these attributes are actually del...

An important outcome of the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations was the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). This was set up to discipline the use of national food safety and animal and plant health regulations and to prevent their emergence as technical barriers to trade. The Agreement p...

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of...

Both the EU's Renewable Energy Directive (RED) and Article 7a of its Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) seek to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transport fuels. The RED mandates a 10% share of renewable energy in transport fuels by 2020, whilst the FQD requires a 6% reduction in GHG emissions (from a 2010 base) by the same date. In practice, i...

This article shows that trust in the organic label as well as perceived positive health effects of consumption of organic products have positive causal effects on actual organic consumption. Furthermore perceived positive environmental effects and perceived better animal welfare related to organic production are found not to have no significant cau...

Research Highlights and Abstract demonstrates that the tools of Historical Institutionalism are valuable for interest group scholars in assessing change offers a way to conceptualize and empirically differentiate between radical and routine change within interest group organisations shows that a group's founding mission is both a constraint and a r...

Global food trade embodies a range of different interpretations of the nature of food and its role in society. On the one hand, the WTO food regulation regime, in particular the SPS agreement, is based upon a somewhat instrumental value of food consumption in which food is seen as a commodity to be traded in accordance with international trade rule...

The agricultural policy agenda has been broadened with farm policy issues now interlinking with other policy domains (food safety, energy supplies, environmental protection, development aid, etc.). New actors promoting values which sometimes conflict, or which are not always easily reconcilable, with those previously guiding agricultural policy hav...

Artiklen er baseret på et komparativt forskningsprojekt , hvor genstandsfeltet er landbrugspolitik til fremme af økologisk landbrug. Gennem projektforløbet er erfaringerne fra en række lande opsamlet, analyseret og sammenlignet. Endvidere har sammenligningerne dannet basis for teoretisk at formulere og forklare, hvilke politiske redskaber der har e...

Policy evolution can be a chain of events linked through reactions and counter-reactions. Each reform event in the sequence is facilitated by previous reform events. Though events in the sequence may seem insignificant when they happen, they may, over time, amount to substantial policy change. The analysis of the sequence of agricultural policy ref...

Studies of environmental policy performance tend to concentrate on the impact of particular policy institutions or of single policy instruments. However, environmental policies most often consist of a package of policy instruments. Further, these studies pay no or very little attention to policy instruments directed at the demand side of the market...

This article focuses on two sets of literature that have developed out of a shared concern with networks: the network governance school, which has been engaged in a set of macro‐level questions about the extent to which networks are changing the nature of state–society relations; and the policy network analysis school, which has focused on the rela...

This paper outlines the global food regulation regime and its institutions, focussing upon the way in which these address organic food trade. While the WTO agreements have rules for scientifically based policy measures adopted to protect human, animal or plant health or life, there is some disagreement on whether the WTO's Agreement on Technical Ba...

Trustworthy eco-labels provide consumers with valuable information on environmentally friendly products and thus promote green consumerism. But what makes an eco-label trustworthy and what can government do to increase consumer confidence? The scant existing literature indicates that low governmental involvement increases confidence. This suggests...

There is now a fairly substantial literature on private global business regulation which focuses on the rise of non-governmental and private regulatory systems alongside traditional state-based systems. These private systems cross national borders and impact on international trade which, in the intergovernmental realm, is governed by the rules of t...

Both interest-group and public-policy scholars accept that groups are important to policy formulation and implementation because they hold valuable capacities. However, the literature has not dealt with whether, and how, groups develop capacities. In this article, we examine the question of group capacity development by focusing on the adaption of...

Government intervention in green infant industries may be justified as a strategy to increase the provision of public goods. How should government policies be designed to promote such industries? One way to analyse this question is to compare government intervention in green infant industries in which it has been successful with green infant indust...

This paper analyses organic farming entry decisions using a piece-wise linear depiction of policy. Our goal is to ascertain, from the available but limited information, whether Danish and UK policy measures toward organic agriculture have affected participation. Despite considerable interest in the growth of organic farming there has been little sy...

Three potential explanations of past reforms of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) can be identified in the literature: a budget constraint, pressure from General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization (GATT/WTO) negotiations or commitments and a paradigm shift emphasising agriculture's provision of public goods. This discussion...

This paper focuses on two sets of literature that have developed out of a shared concern with networks: the network governance school; and the policy network analysis school. Whereas the first set of literature has been concerned with understanding what impact the growth of networks has had on the way in which modern societies are governed, the sec...

In many cases, when governments commit themselves to green policy targets, they also imply the development of ‘green’ industries to reach those targets. But, how do governments foster the development of such industries? This is particularly relevant because such industries are often in a very early stage of their evolution. Taking the case of organ...

A key motive for establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was restoring public confidence in the wake of multiplying food scares and the BSE crisis. Scholars, however, have paid little attention to the actual political and institutional logics that shaped this new organization. This article explores the dynamics underpinning the makin...

Trustworthy eco-labels provide consumers with valuable information on environ-mentally friendly products and thus promote green consumerism. But what makes an eco-label trustworthy and what can government do to increase consumer confidence? The scant existing literature seems to argue that low governmental involvement increases confidence. Accordin...

Agriculture has a small, and declining, importance in employment and income generation within the EU, but a political importance well beyond its economic impact. The EU's common agricultural policy (CAP) has often been the source of conflict between the EU and its trade partners within first the GATT, and then the WTO. In the Doha Round agriculture...

This paper argues that the Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture (URAA) introduced the market liberal paradigm as the ideational underpinning of the new farm trade regime. Though the immediate consequences in terms of limitations on agricultural support and protection were very modest, the Agreement did impact on the way in which domestic farm pol...

A research analysis suggests that a state certification and labelling system creates confidence in organic labelling systems and consequently green consumerism. Danish consumers have higher levels of confidence in the labelling system than consumers in countries where the state plays a minor role in labelling and certification.

This article sets out to bring the concept of reactive sequencing into policy studies and demonstrate its value in the analysis of policy reform. Reactive sequencing is based on the notion that early events in a sequence set in motion a chain of causally linked reactions and counter-reactions which trigger subsequent development. Since responses to...

Three potential explanations of past CAP reforms have been identified in the literature: a budget constraint, pressure from GATT/WTO negotiations or commitments, and a paradigm shift emphasising agriculture’s provision of public goods. The presentation, content and context of the Health Check reform proposals of 2007/08 are assessed. The propo...

As a fast growing state sponsored industry, the organic food sector is likely to attract the increased attention of policy analysts who are interested in industry development. We critically review the European comparative research on growth in the organic sector, focusing on policy analysis. A common element in these accounts is that findings are b...

In 1992, the United States and the European Community (EC) reached an agreement on the Uruguay Round Agreement of Agriculture (URAA). A comparison of the EC's and the United States's initial agricultural proposals with the final agreement shows that the specific commitments agreed to reduce agricultural support and protection went a long way to acc...

Recent work on industry policy argues that group and state capacity are important in underpinning (or undermining) the capacity to govern industrial development. Put simply, group capacity – alongside state capacity – is deemed an important ingredient in any recipe for (re)developing national industry. This article further develops the literature o...

From 1948 to 1994, the agricultural sector was afforded special treatment in the GATT. We analyse the extent to which this agricultural exceptionalism was curbed as a result of the GATT Uruguay Round Agreement on Agriculture, discuss why it was curbed and finally explore the implication of this for EU policy making. We argue that, in particular, tw...