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Late bloomer? Agricultural policy integration and coordination patterns in climate policies

Nicole M. Schmidt (Heidelberg University)

Agriculture not only ranks among the biggest contributors to climate change, but the agricultural sector is also one of the most vulnerable to the impact of rising temperatures and extreme weather events. In light of its contribution and exposure to climate change, we may expect agriculture to feature prominently in debates on climate policy. In her article “Late bloomer? Agricultural policy integration and coordination patterns in climate policies” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Nicole M. Schmidt notes that despite its status, agriculture nonetheless seems to fall “between the cracks in climate policymaking.” Nicole analyses the content of more than 1,000 climate policies of 176 developed and developing countries adopted between 1990 and 2017 to identify whether climate policies reference agricultural issues and whether agriculture ministries were involved in the policy-making process. Nicole’s findings show that about half of the examined climate policies feature agricultural or food-related items, with an uptick in mentions of agricultural issues in both EU and non-EU countries’ climate policies since 2005. However, her findings also demonstrate that the remaining half of climate policies omit agricultural issues, while input from agricultural ministries is hardly ever mentioned. Based on this evidence, Nicole concludes that the “fragmentation of agricultural components and the absence of agricultural ministries in the coordination process highlight the challenges of integrating agriculture into climate policies and suggest that both domains continue to co-exist rather than to merge into an entity.”