Improving the resilience‐enabling capacity of the Common Agricultural Policy: policy recommendations for more resilient EU farming systems

One of the aims of the post‐2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is to improve the resilience of Europe's farming systems. The CAP of the budget period 2014–2020, however, has insufficiently supported the resilience of farming systems. The ongoing CAP reform process offers an appropriate opportunity to integrate a broader perspective on resilience in the CAP. We therefore propose a set of policy recommendations on how to improve the capability of the CAP to support more fully the resilience (i.e. robustness, adaptability and transformability) of farming systems in the EU. The policy recommendations are based on a comparative analysis of six national co‐design workshops with stakeholders and a final EU‐level workshop with Brussels‐based experts. We concluded three key lessons about the CAP's influence on resilience: (1) resilience challenges, needs and policy effects are context‐specific; (2) resilience capacities are complementary, but trade‐offs between robustness, adaptability and transformability occur at the level of policies and due to budget competition; (3) there is a need for a coordinated long‐term vision for Europe's agriculture, which is difficult to achieve through the bargaining processes associated with a CAP reform. We propose specific policy recommendations that could contribute to a better balance between policies that support robustness, adaptability and transformability of Europe's farming systems

D4.5: Policy recommendations for strengthening the Common Agricultural Policy’s resilience impacts

In its Communication on the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after 2020, the European Commission (2017) declared their ambition to foster a ‘resilient agricultural sector’. Work package 4 of the SURE-Farm project has the double aim of assessing how the current CAP and adjacent policies perform in enabling European farming systems’ resilience – distinguishing between the resilience capacities of robustness, adaptability and transformability (Meuwissen et al., 2019) – and of formulating recommendations for improved policy outcomes. Previous tasks in this work package involved an expert assessment of the CAP’s enabling and constraining effects (Feindt et al., 2019), as well as a bottom-up analysis of how farming system actors experience the influence of multilevel policy configurations on their resilience. The study presented in this report builds on these previous analyses by identifying various promising options for the CAP, including national implementations, to maximise its contribution to greater resilience of EU farming systems. These options serve as input for ongoing political debates on the reform of the CAP post-2020, the development of the proposed National Strategic Plans that spell out national priorities and implementation choices, as well as the European Commission’s “From Farm to Fork Strategy”, which aims to foster a circular food system, as part of the European Green Deal. For the UK case study (see below), we reflect on promising courses of action for post-Brexit agricultural policy.In order to develop viable policy pathways, the study draws on various co-creation methods, through which SURE-Farm researchers engaged with a broad range of stakeholders. The core of the research consists of six national stakeholder workshops – in the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Spain, Poland, and Italy – as well as a final workshop with EU stakeholders in Brussels. Theseworkshops were complemented by an online deliberation exercise conducted on SURE-Farm’s cocreation platforms and a concise review of promising resilience-enabling policies in the six countries. The report proceeds as follows: after a more detailed discussion of the methods used in this study, section 3 presents the main findings of the four research activities. The report ends by recommending various policy directions that emerged from the analysis as offering the most potential for improving the CAP’s impact on the robustness, adaptability, and/or transformability of Europe’s farming systems