Bentsen, Peter Øgård

Nordkild, Alexander Rosenbech Klein

Pedersen, Kirstine Crenzien

Thygesen, Sarah

Thykier, Carl Christian Krabbe

This paper seeks to examine, how EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) can be used to boost sustainability in Denmark’s agricultural sector. Designed as a case study of the Danish agricultural sector, through a critical realistic perspective, this study focuses on the structuralized rules and norms that makes the agricultural sector resistant to grad-ual change. The agricultural sector is responsible for at least 22% of the total green-house gas emission in Denmark. On a global level, several of the planetary boundaries have already been crossed. These facts indicate the need for change in the current agri-cultural policy, if we are to meet the goals set by the government and the Paris-agree-ment. To gain insight in what is shaping the current agricultural sector, the essential commodity, food, is viewed as a sociotechnical system. As a part of the system, agricul-ture is the production of this essential commodity. The production of food consists of various rules and norms. These rules and norms take shape as structures that forms the agricultural sector. The structures are intervened throughout the system resulting in lock-in effects, hindering change. The high degree of alignment between the structures makes it almost impossible to change one rule as the lock-in effects prevents gradual development. The environmental conservation and climate change mitigation change in Denmark’s agricultural sector, to a certain extent, becomes a choice between sustaina-bility and competitiveness. The changing governments continues to choose a higher de-gree of competitiveness over sustainability as they are controlled by the underlying structures in the sociotechnical system. As this paper concludes, some structures are too dominant for the CAP to change as they reach beyond this sociotechnical system. For the CAP to boost the environmental conservation and climate change mitigation in Denmark’s agricultural sector, it must decrease the room for self-implementation and make it easier for the niches to increase their market shares

Sustainability in Danish agriculture: Common Agricultural Policies effect on sustainable practices

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Roskilde Universitet