Understanding the diversity of European rural areas - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 38

Another environmental arena where regulation will increasingly impact on the farm sector
is in relation to societal responses to climate change. The EU has instituted policy targets
with respect to decarbonization in the Europe 2020 initiative and expects these to be
embedded in Rural Development Programme actions. Under the 'Resource Efficient
Europe' Flagship Initiative, the European Commission (EC) seeks to “support the shift
towards a resource efficient and low-carbon economy that is efficient in the way it uses all
resources. The aim is to decouple our economic growth from resource and energy use,
reduce CO 2 emissions, enhance competitiveness and promote greater energy security” (EC,
2010:15). It is widely recognized that the farm sector is both instrumental in significant
emissions and has capacity to sequester carbon in various ways.
A further area of engagement with wider public policies is that relating the farm sector
to spatial planning. There has been a retreat from thinking sectorally about agriculture
towards thinking more in terms of territorial development. There is recognition that
agricultural developments are often framed by regional and sub-regional influences,
particularly proximity to large cities. Forward-looking cities (such as Amsterdam, or
Rennes, the example used in Darrot et al. , this volume) are increasingly looking to develop
more integrated approaches to planning low carbon futures with their hinterlands exploited
for sustainable local food and rural recreational opportunity. Further, farm diversification
has often thrown farm businesses into the more uncertain regulatory structures of town and
country planning, when regulatory approval may be required for tourism or food processing
developments (see Curry and Owen, 1996 for an early discussion of this). Overall, when
engaging in diversification or maintenance of less productive farm systems which secure
highly valued ecosystem services, land managers are often confronted with conflicting
policy discourses and tools, leading to difficult tensions in the everyday decisions (Pinto-
Correia et al. , 2014). Much more integration across sectors at the level of policy design and
at the level of the local administration can be seen as needed to support sustainability
transitions (see Pinto-Correia et al. b and Darnhofer et al. , both this volume).
How do we interpret these policy changes? In the 1990s, a number of authors adopted a
post-productivist interpretation of policy change and, in spite of strong interest from some
(Mather et al. , 2006), the concept has often been criticized as unclear (Wilson, 2001; Evans
et al. , 2002). Indeed, Potter and Tilzey (2005) strongly reject post-productivism and argue
that the advance of market logic is aided by a neoliberal policy discourse which prevails
over competing policy discourses. The less controversial term 'multifunctional' has
increasingly been used by both policy makers and academics to describe the principles and
policies supporting agriculture in the EU. However, the neoliberal policy agenda implies a
primary policy ethos to support the agri-food system, rather than deliver to the
multifunctionality agenda and support public good delivery within a post-productivist/
multifunctional policy framework. Holmes' (2006, 2012) re-diagnosis of post-
productivism as multifunctionality partly overcomes the Potter and Tilzey critique but in
relation to the European context, perhaps fails to disentangle the struggle between support
for farming enterprise (which, as Pillar 1, clearly remains the dominant part of the CAP)
and support for public goods (and thereby multifunctionality) which is effected largely
through the much weaker Pillar 2 of the CAP (i.e. the Rural Development Programme
(RDP)). Whilst the multifunctionality policy discourse is powerful, it arguably remains
subsidiary to the overarching support of production and, in the shadow of food security
debates, it may even be possible to argue for a post-post-productivist productivism, or more
simply neo-productivism or a new bio-economy (Marsden, 2013).