LIST OF PANELS

Food governance under conditions of globalization and limited resources from the global to the local level is becoming a menacing policy challenge. Related implications affect established policy paradigms within agriculture and food policy, but also policy areas traditionally separated from food and agricultural policy. Organizations that originally dealt with agricultural or food policies are reframing their focus to expand to interconnected, separately governed issues, such as climate change and sustainable development. Similarly, civil society organizations and multinational corporations in the food sector are increasingly co-producing public services. These developments challenge established analytical concepts in political science, e.g., the distinction between public and private becomes increasingly opaque through public-private partnerships with ensuing challenges to decision-making procedures and the categorization of stakeholders, and to traditional concepts such as accountability, transparency, and representation. Similarly, the boundaries of international regimes are becoming blurred, with, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals merging norms from climate, environmental, food and human rights regimes, setting the scene for future contestation of competences and resources.

Two recent debates in the food governance scholarship that we are particularly interested in and that bear relevance to the broader policy sciences are those on post-exceptionalism and food policy integration. The post-exceptionalism hypothesis refers to an expected ‘partial transformation in which an exceptionalist policy sector [e.g., agriculture] has not been completely ‘normalized’ and in which old and new ideas, institutions, interests and policy instruments coexist.’ (Daugbjerg and Feindt, 2017: 1573) Although this hypothesis is intuitively appealing, so far few empirical investigations have been carried out. Food policy integration refers to recent attempts of governments across levels to develop distinctive food policies and institutions and/or integrate food-related concerns across sectors and levels (Candel and Pereira, 2017). Given the variety in governments’ challenges, policy styles and political preferences, we expect differences in policy design and implementation as well as in how broader food politics play out (cf. Sonnino et al., 2018). In addition, studies of food policy integration have given rise to more fundamental theoretical and methodological innovations with regard to how to conceptualize and assess policy integration in the first place.

References:

- Candel JJL and Pereira L. (2017) Towards integrated food policy: Main challenges and steps ahead. Environmental Science & Policy 73: 89-92.

- Daugbjerg C and Feindt PH. (2017) Post-exceptionalism in public policy: transforming food and agricultural policy. Journal of European Public Policy 24: 1565-1584.

- Sonnino R, Tegoni CLS and De Cunto A. (2018) The challenge of systemic food change: Insights from cities. Cities.

This Panel critically analyzes the re-negotiation of the boundaries in agri-food governance. We particularly welcome papers that contribute to the debates on post-exceptionalism and food policy integration, but are open to any other innovative contributions, including theoretical reflections on suitable concepts, proposals for new analytical or conceptual frameworks, in-depth and comparative case-studies that explore these shifts and related implications, and proposals for innovative solutions to address negative implications. As we strongly believe in the merits of using domain-specific insights for theoretical innovation (and vice-versa), we encourage paper-submitters to reflect on the relevance of their contribution to the policy sciences more generally.