For Farmers or the Environment? The European Parliament in the 2013 CAP Reform

Viviane Gravey,Aron Buzogány

doi:10.17645/pag.v9i3.4033

Abstract

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the last policy field to be placed under the Ordinary Legislative Procedure and its 2013 reform was the first to be decided under this rule. This article analyses how rule changes following the Lisbon Treaty have shaped policy outcomes related to ‘greening,’ i.e., making agricultural policy more environmentally friendly. Measuring the policy ambitions of amendments during the different phases of the legislative process (the processing phase within the Parliament and the negotiating phase during trilogues), we find that the European Parliament weakened the Commission’s greening proposals—but did so to support an alternative greening agenda built on different policy instruments. This means that rule change has altered the power balance between the institutions, making the Commission more dependent on the European Parliament. In the 2013 reform, this new balance of power came at the cost of greening the CAP.

Highlights

After the Lisbon Treaty, inter‐institutional power dynam‐ ics of the EU have been marked by two contrary develop‐ ments: The empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) through the extension of both budgetary and leg‐ islative powers and the crisis‐induced activism of the EU Council, which was often seen to limit the manoeuvring space available for supranational institutions (Bickerton et al, 2015)
We address this by turning to the EU’s largest redis‐ tributive policy: the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Politics and Governance, 2021, Volume 9, Issue 3, Pages 16–28 which was under strict intergovernmental control before the rule changes imposed by the Lisbon Treaty
Agricultural policy is an outlier: The EP’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI) has long been a bastion for the status quo, as reluctant, if not more, than the Council on CAP reform. This is in sharp contrast with issues such as data protection or the environment, where the EP had long been more radical than the Council yet tempered its radicalism when gaining greater power (Burns, 2019; Ripoll Servent, 2015). This created a dilemma for the EP Plenary: Would it endorse AGRI’s position despite its lack of representativeness, or would it risk undermining its standing as ‘responsible’ and ‘reasonable’ in its first CAP reform as a co‐legislator by rejecting its Committee’s position? We find that the Plenary attempted to reject the Committee’s position on the flagship green payment (GP) but failed due to polarisation, while it was able to adopt more ambi‐ tious positions than AGRI on the other two instruments

Summary

Introduction

After the Lisbon Treaty, inter‐institutional power dynam‐ ics of the EU have been marked by two contrary develop‐ ments: The empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) through the extension of both budgetary and leg‐ islative powers and the crisis‐induced activism of the EU Council, which was often seen to limit the manoeuvring space available for supranational institutions (Bickerton et al, 2015). Agricultural policy is an outlier: The EP’s Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI) has long been a bastion for the status quo, as reluctant, if not more, than the Council on CAP reform This is in sharp contrast with issues such as data protection or the environment, where the EP had long been more radical than the Council yet tempered its radicalism when gaining greater power (Burns, 2019; Ripoll Servent, 2015). Ies the legislative changes made within the EP, focusing on the policy positions of both AGRI and the Plenary and discusses the outcomes of the 2013 trilogues This shows that the EP played a key role, together with the Council, in weakening the European Commission’s orig‐ inal greening proposals. We close by highlighting the need for closer coordination between the European Commission and EP in order to unlock more fundamental CAP reforms

Rule Change in the EP

Empirical Approach

Findings

The Processing Phase

The Negotiating Phase

Conclusions