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Against the odds: How policy capacity can compensate for weak instruments in promoting sustainable food

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Abstract

There has been revived scholarly interest in policy capacity recently. While it is widely assumed that capacity is important for policy performance, it is difficult to separate its impact from the effect of policy instruments to establish whether capacity can produce an independent and positive effect on target group behavior in relation to achieving policy objectives. Undertaking a critical case study where policy performed well despite the use of weak policy instruments, this paper analyzes whether policy capacity can have a positive independent impact on policy performance. The Danish program to increase the proportion of organic food served in public sector kitchens demonstrates that policy capacity can independently influence policy performance. It can compensate for the weakness of soft and indirect policy instruments and bring about policy performance that goes beyond what can be expected, given the limited ability of the instruments to stimulate behavioral change. A high level of capacity was achieved by drawing on resources possessed by interest groups. While interest groups’ and other private actors’ positive contribution to policy capacity is recognized, only a limited number of studies have analyzed how such actors contribute to capacity generation. Therefore, this paper applies a sectoral perspective in which policy capacity is understood as the ability to pool and coordinate relevant resources available within a policy sector.

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Notes

  1. Includes certification of kitchens in the private sector.

  2. Troels V. Østergaard served on the Council as the representative of the Consumer Council from 1987 to 97.

  3. https://kbh-madhus.webflow.io/omos/voreshistorie, accessed 19 December 2019.

  4. The Organic School continued to exist long after the conversion program initiative (Økologi & Erhverv, 2017, issue 619: 20).

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Acknowledgments

This is a revised version of a paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, virtual event, August 2020. I thank the participants at this event and in particular Gerry Alons, Yonatan Schvartzman and the two reviewers of this journal for constructive comments helping me to improve the paper. I would also like to thank Stuart Wright for language editing and the interviewees for providing valuable information and insights. The research was conducted under the public service contract between the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and the Department of Food and Resource Economics, University of Copenhagen. The arm’s-length principle applies to such research.

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    Carsten Daugbjerg

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Daugbjerg, C. Against the odds: How policy capacity can compensate for weak instruments in promoting sustainable food. Policy Sci 55, 451–467 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-022-09466-2

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