Territorial Policies and Transformative Politics? Agri-Environmentalism in Central Spain

Abstract

Increasingly, geographers are adopting so-called ‘new institutional’ approaches in order to examine scalar processes of socioeconomic and political restructuring. The authors build on this development by showing how a new institutional analysis of policy implementation transcending different politico-geographic scales might be undertaken. Using contemporary public policy theories, they show how new institutional analyses can be fine-tuned to identify common scalar themes for detailed examination at local through to supranational scales. Drawing on a case study of agri-environmental policy implementation in central Spain between 1992 and 1998, the authors use this nuanced new institutional approach to elucidate the flows of knowledge, territorial representation, and power between multiscalar policy elites. They demonstrate how the interplay between the political strategies of these scalar elites, and the presence of ‘historically sedimented’ institutional forms in the central Spanish region of Castilla la Mancha, have shaped local agri-environmental policy outcomes.