Scale and the politics of agri-environmental governance: reframing agri-environmental policy through practice

Minna Kaljonen

Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE)

minna.kaljonen@ymparisto.fi

The Finnish agri-environmental policy went through significant change in 1995, when Finland joined the European Union (EU) and became part of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The agri-environmental policy is based on a principle that farmers should be paid for providing environmental goods. The Finnish policy model is characterised by a basic tension between a general protection scheme (GPS), which is nation wide and covers over 90% of Finnish farmland, and a special protection scheme (SPS), which offers more focussed measures for environmental protection. The schemes offer farmers economic support for covering the investment costs and loss of income caused by the environmental actions. The GPS was built to compensate the decline in farm income caused by the EU membership in 1995 and the SPS is promoted especially by the environmental organisations. This choice of a policy model has laid a distinct feature to the Finnish discussion on the agricultural pollution and the management of it. The different actors are discussing on what kind of policy tools and measures implemented at which scale would bring the best results. Deeply embedded in the discussion is the tension between the European agricultural policies, the future of Finnish agricultural production and the local context of agri-environmental management.

In this article I discuss the ways in which scale is produced and reproduced by the implementation practices of the agri-environmental policy. Several studies have highlighted that the process through which the policy objectives are translated into practice is crucial for the outcome of the policy (e.g. Buller et al. 2000; Burgess et al. 2000; Curry & Winter 2000; Juntti & Potter 2002; Kaljonen 2006). In this article I will analyse this translation process by focussing on the practices of the different actors and reveal how policy frame and implementation practices produce one another. I will look how the different actors, have interpreted the policy goals, how they strive for their own goals with the given means and how their organisational routines guide their practice. By opening up the practices of different actors I reveal the contesting policy frames operating at different scales. I will also discuss how the implementation practices have contributed to the reframing of policy goals.