Interest Groups and the Governance of Growth in Organic Farming

In this paper we probe the issue of developing capacity by exploring the organisational evolution of the key organic interest groups in Australia, the UK and Denmark. A comparison of the Organic Federation of Australia (OFA), the British Soil Association (SA) and the Danish National Association of Organic Farming, NAOF (later the National Organic Association, NOA) is particularly useful in investigating the nuts and bolts of interest group capacity development and adjustment. They emerged from a similar milieu; yet they developed their capacities very differently. While all three associations have developed capacities for the promotion of the organic sector in relation to consumers, farmers and government, they differ significantly in relation to capacity development as it pertains to policy implementation. The key differences can be explained by variation in the organic farm policies of the three countries. The comparison also demonstrates that existing groups can adapt capacities when policy changes, even where neo-liberal inspired policy strategies are deployed

Generating Governance Capacity in Infant Industries: The Development of Organic Farming in Denmark and Australia

Organic farming is of increasing interest to policy makers as it has been linked to environmental, rural development and market related outcomes which have high political salience. As such, attention naturally turns to catalysing organic growth. Patterns of growth vary considerably among countries, but existing explanations of variation lack authority. This paper compares the development of organic farming sectors in Australia and Denmark, countries at polar ends of the organic sector development continuum. They provide a good comparison as both countries share key characteristics, such as a history of state-agricultural industry partnerships, an implicit post-1980’s consensus around a market model for agricultural industry development, and the general absence of consumer distrust over food quality. After ruling out a number of well worn explanations for differential growth we focus on the role of governance capacity. We argue that the Danish case, in contrast with Australia, demonstrates that when well-developed associative and state capacities can combine alongside interest intermediation then governance capacity is generated and infant industry development is made possible

Governing growth in organic farming: The evolving capacities of organic groups in the United Kingdom and Denmark

The question of the ‘policy capacity’ of interest groups is increasingly gaining prominence as a key variable in governing and transformative capacities. This raises the issue of whether group policy capacities can be developed. While group scholars have long talked of group capacity, this has largely amounted to compiling a ‘shopping list’ of possible capacities general to all groups. There has not been much attention to variations in capacity among groups, or with the development of capacity by a single group over time. This paper takes a tentative step towards filling this gap. In pursuing this general line of inquiry we argue that (i) initial ‘selection’ of group type shapes scope of capacity development, (ii) groups seek to adapt capacity to changing policy contexts, and (iii) adaptive efforts are shaped by the ‘legacy’ of the originating type – change is bounded unless the group engages in ‘radical’ organisational changes (e.g. redefinition of entire purpose). This general argument is fleshed out by comparing and contrasting the evolution of the key organic interest groups in both the UK and Denmark

Analysis of the European Market for Organic Food

"Analysis of the European market for organic food" is the first volume to be published by the OMIaRD project. In providing the most comprehensive and up to date information and analysis of European organic food markets, it offers important information in its own right but also contributes a foundation for further study. It covers all important aspects of the organic market, including production, consumption, foreign trade, supply deficits, prices and premiums. Nineteen countries have been separately investigated, and comparison and overview allow important policy and marketing conclusions to emerge

The mobilisation of organised interests in policy making: access, activity and bias in the 'group system'.

What organized interests are mobilized in influencing public policy? What does the map of organised interests - the 'group system' - look like? This has been a central concern in political science for decades. The reason for this preoccupation is clear. As Schlozman (2009) succinctly notes '...since organized interests are so important in informing public officials about the preferences and needs of stakeholders in political controversies and about how policies affect their lives and fortunes, the shape of the organized interest community matters crucially for the equal protection of citizen interests'. This broad area of scholarly endeavour has settled into a set of more or less well established focal points. Following Schattschneider (1960), there has been a consistent finding of a 'business bias' in the 'group system'. Others have focussed upon the declining centrality of 'producer' interests to policy making: suggesting that there is a 'hollow core' to policy communities (Heinz et al. 1993). It has been argued that the group system is characterised by the growth of niche or specialised policy actors. These propositions and questions have rarely been explored empirically in quantitative studies outside of the US, and certainly not for the UK or Scotland

Who Gives Evidence to Parliamentary Committees? A Comparative Investigation of Parliamentary Committees and their Constituencies

This article focuses on the interaction between parliamentary committees and external actors. How is the interaction organised, and how does it influence which interests are voiced? The authors show that institutional variation in procedures for calling witnesses and variation in committee agendas influence both the composition of actors and the concentration of evidence. By composition of actors, they refer to the set of different actor types involved. By evidence concentration, they refer to the extent to which evidence is provided by a relatively small share of active actors. The study is based on a new data set of all contacts between parliamentary committees and external actors in one year across three countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands. Interestingly, the findings show that procedures of invitation rather than open calls increase the diversity of actor composition and decrease the concentration of actor evidence. This, however, comes at a cost, since the overall volume of contacts is reduced

Multiple arenas, multiple populations: counting organized interests in Scottish public policy.

The basic premise of this book is that counting populations of organized interests is a worthwhile activity. The opening chapter - not to mention many of the contributions - provides numerous persuasive reasons. In this chapter, all this is taken for granted, and it pursues some of the challenges inherent in actually counting populations. It starts with what seems at face value to be a single perfectly reasonable and achievable aspiration in relation to data on organized interest populations - namely, to be able to say something authoritative about the basic size and composition of the politically active organized interest system. This is a deceptively difficult task

Does group engagement with members constitute a "beneficial inefficiency"?

This article explores the role of variations in organizational form in explaining levels of group access. Specifically, we test whether group forms incorporating more extensive engagement with members receive policy advantages. We develop and test a account of beneficial inefficiencies. Our account reasons that the costs of inefficient intraorganizational processes and practices associated with enhanced engagement with members are beneficial as they generate crucial “access goods”—specifically encompassing positions—that in turn receive enhanced policy benefits. The costs of intraorganizational practices allowing members to engage more thoroughly in decision making are thus beneficial inefficiencies. We test this proposition using data on the Australian interest group system. Using the tools of cluster analysis, we identify three forms, each varying in respect of the inefficiencies they embody. Our multivariate analysis finds strong support for the account of beneficial inefficiencies: groups with the most inefficient organizational model receiving the greatest policy access.Australian Research Council, Grant/Award Number: (DP140104097

The European Commission and the public governance of interest groups in the European Union: seeking a niche between accreditation and laissez-faire.

As interest groups participate in public policy, so demands arise for the regulation of their input. These vary between purposeful laissez-faire, and accreditation in return for norm observance, with attempts to find points between these often focusing on supervised and/or incentivised self-regulation. We classify the EU system as de-facto accreditation, based around generalised and ill-defined notions, and on preferences for the simplification of consultative life and to screen out outsider groups with a narrow membership basis that dont follow the rules of the game. The operationalisation of representativity criteria carries with it the danger of privileging certain categories of groups over other types of groups. A wider legitimacy basis is suggested by a limited comparative literature, a sharpening of the concept of accountability and types of interest groups

Agenda-setting instruments: means and strategies for the management of policy demands

Students of public policy have spent considerable effort setting out the types of policy instruments or tools available to policymakers in different stages of the policy process. A nascent strand of this important work concerns the agend-asetting phase, where scholars aim to understand the instruments–procedural and substantive–that government uses to shape the issues that it has to address. There is however limited engagement between scholarship on interest groups and this ongoing discussion around agenda-setting tools. This paper aims to fill this gap by identifying different types of agenda-setting tools deployed by government which are used to shape engagement from organised interests. These tools are classified as those which governments use to routinise demands, regularise demands, generate demands, and impose issues onto the agenda. The paper refocuses attention of policy scholars onto the means and strategies that policymakers deploy to manage government agendas, a process which has clear implications for what becomes a policy problem and thereafter potentially subject to governmental action