Eco-social policy in the global political economy: Analysing shifting discourses on agricultural subsidies

Abstract

While critical political economy (CPE) has yet to play a prominent role in eco-social policy research, this paper argues that a deeper engagement with CPE and a better understanding of the global political economy can enhance eco-social policy debates. CPE can help us to see the contradictions in and impediments to integrating environmental and social policies, and particularly why both of these categories continue to be mediated and shaped by economic logics. In order to develop these arguments, we analyse recent international discourses on agricultural subsidies promoted by key policy actors such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development. By examining agriculture as a nodal point between diverse scales and domains such as the local, global, environmental, social, and economic spheres, we explore how certain positions are prioritised over others. We argue that the discourse on ‘repurposing subsidies’ in global agricultural policy expresses a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ that recognises the need for transformation but fails to address the structural conditions of the global political economy responsible for environmental and social crises. Instead, the proposed solutions rely on existing institutions and capitalist logics to resolve current crises, even if the latter are underpinned by these logics. Our analysis underlines the need for eco-social policy scholarship to be cognizant of how environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a particular global political economy that reproduces certain inequalities and is not a neutral policy terrain.

Keywords

Agriculture subsidies global governance critical political economy eco-social policy

Introduction

Social and environmental policy have played important if distinct roles in managing crisis tendencies within capitalist economies. The ecological crisis, alongside an evolving social crisis, however, requires a policy response that is both environmentally and socially just. As such, a more integrated approach has emerged amongst both researchers and policymakers – eco-social policy (Bonvin and Laruffa, 2022; Brandl and Zielinska, 2020; Dukelow, 2022; Gough, 2017; Gugushvili and Otto, 2023). Yet it is not easy to move from arguing for eco-social policy to achieving it in practice. Underlying tensions as to what this concept means are far from resolved. Is there a win-win situation where everyone benefits, or will there always be policy trade-offs? And if so, what, where, why and for whom? Although most policymakers and researchers acknowledge these crises and suggest that there is a need for a paradigm shift in policymaking, there is little consensus on what this should look like, nor at what scale this could occur.

Moreover, within eco-social policy debates there is limited recognition of the dynamics that structure the global political economy, and thus shape the policymaking space. For example, within welfare state studies, a key implicit concern is that welfare remains bound to a specific geographic entity, primarily the state. Yet the ecological crisis is necessarily global in scope, although its impacts are unevenly spread. And while critical political economy (CPE) perspectives have explored the transition from a green growth to a degrowth policymaking framework (Buch-Hansen, 2018; Buch-Hansen and Carstensen, 2021) and have made links to degrowth scholarship (Koch and Buch-Hansen, 2021), there has been less dialogue between CPE and eco-social policy scholarship, even though green growth and degrowth feature in this literature. We propose that eco-social policy debates could be enriched through deeper engagement with CPE, specifically through a deeper understanding of the global political economy. This will reveal the underlying contradictions within and obstacles to environmental and social policy integration, namely, how the environmental and social spheres are positioned in service to the economic sphere.

We suggest that there is a pressing need to untangle some of these tensions, and to explore how and in what ways they relate to and facilitate one another, and from this how actors within the global political economy are promoting certain positions over others. To do this, we explore policy fields that provide an organic overlap between ecological, social and economic matters at the global level. Agricultural policy is a good example: food access, quality and cost are clearly issues of social welfare and security, while at the same time agriculture is responsible for over a quarter of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022: 8). Reducing agricultural emissions will be a challenge for the food system at a time when demand for food is increasing. Moreover, the agricultural supply chain is globalised, includes transnational corporations and local farmers and is mediated by trade and industrial policy. Agriculture is, we suggest, a nodal point at the intersection of the ecological, economic and social, where certain contradictions between these spheres cannot be avoided, while also being firmly embedded within the global political economy. As such, agricultural policy is an interesting case through which to explore eco-social policy as a concept and emerging policy field.

To do this we draw on global social policy, which explores how policy can be formulated, disseminated and implemented at this level, focusing on international organisations (IOs) (e.g. Béland and Orenstein, 2013; Martens et al., 2021). We examine shifting discourses within key international organisations – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Bank and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – that impact agricultural policy, specifically exploring agricultural subsidies. Although our analysis is on the global level and concerns IOs, these discourses are embedded in current European Union (EU) debates on agricultural policy. For example, organisations such as the FAO specifically reference the European agricultural subsidy regime when advocating the ‘repurposing’ of agricultural subsidies. Additionally, although the EU does not explicitly call for a ‘repurposing of agricultural subsidies’ (despite actually summarising the report of the FAO et al.),¹ proponents use this discourse to influence the priorities of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) (Rac et al., 2023; Régnier et al., 2023).

While some studies examine the effects of agricultural subsidy programmes on GHG emissions (Laborde et al., 2021), poverty (Dorward and Morrison, 2015) and their relationship to protectionist and free-trade policies (Koo and Kennedy, 2006), there is no discourse theoretically-inspired analysis of agricultural subsidies in the global political economy. Yet without a systemic discursive critique, the discursive mechanisms that are employed to perpetuate incumbent policy ideas while suppressing more radical alternatives remain obscured. These shifts are also relevant for debates on social security, as changes in agricultural subsidy regimes can impact economic stability and overall wellbeing – or social security understood broadly – and food security (Sabates-Wheeler et al., 2009), particularly in rural areas.

By tracing the common discursive shifts within the mentioned organisations, we will show how subsidies have shifted from being conceived as market-distorting, to a call for their ‘repurposing’ to address social and ecological crises. Yet as we will show, this move has limited systemic impact, and rather fits within, as Brand et al. (2020) suggest, a new critical orthodoxy on policy solutions. To develop this argument, we first outline different positions within eco-social policy, before providing some explanations of our methodological approach. In Section 4 we provide a case description of the discourse analysed, while in Section 5 we develop our analytical argument by applying a CPE perspective to the discourse. We conclude by offering some reflections on the underlying tensions and potential for the emergence of an eco-social agricultural policy.

Tensions and synergies in eco-social policy

To begin with, what is eco-social policy? While traditionally, environmental policy and social policy evolved as two distinct and at times competing policy fields, particularly in welfare state models, the contemporary and concurrent ecological and social crises have required a more holistic approach to policymaking – a greening of social policy alongside a socialising of environmental policy. At the global level, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are one example of a more integrated approach (with debatable success). Policy integration has not been smooth, with eco-social policy containing opposing political strategies and perspectives. The fact, then, that this concept can refer to both the SDGs and more radical degrowth policy proposals, obscures some fundamental contradictions that emerge when bringing these fields together, for example their relationship to economic growth.

A key underlying tension is the relationship between the ecological and social fields and how they are embedded within the economic sphere. Mandelli (2022) and Schoyen et al. (2022) have described this as the eco-social growth trilemma. Rather than challenging the premise of a growth-orientated regime, this approach defines sustainable development through three distinct spheres – the economic, ecological, and social – each with its own logics and policy objectives (O’Connor, 2006). Importantly, each sphere is dependent upon the others, to varying degrees. For example, the economic sphere requires nature, here understood as nature’s services or capital for production, which concurrently impacts nature's regenerative capacity. It is also dependent on human capital, as well as a pliant polity, often secured through social policies. While this approach importantly highlights this interdependent relationship, less attention is paid to the pre-existing unequal power relations that shape each sphere and policy field.

Some scholars, particularly those active in degrowth debates, are increasingly acknowledging the complicated and structuring role of economic growth in these fields. Traditionally, social policy was ‘a complement to a growing economy’ (Meadowcroft, 2005: 11). Economic growth was a pre-requisite for functioning welfare provision; with increasing material wealth and gradual population growth there would be steady economic growth, in turn creating a steady supply of new jobs and businesses, leading to increased tax revenues from which welfare state services could be expanded (Gough and Meadowcroft, 2011). Conversely, social policy arrangements also contribute to and enforce economic growth (Büchs, 2021), broadly captured by the notion of social investment (Deeming and Smyth, 2018). The question asked is whether social policy can be de-coupled from a growth paradigm or whether this would lead to a fiscal crisis (Koch, 2022)? Exploring environmental policy, expanding growth increases material resource demand and GHG emissions, overshooting planetary boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009). The question for both fields is whether or not growth can be re-defined independent of material throughput, or whether ecological crisis means that economic growth should be abandoned all together (Gough and Meadowcroft, 2011).

Beyond the contested assumption of continued growth and thus primacy of the economic sphere, there are further tensions in policy implementation. For example, environmental policies can have socially regressive effects: some carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes, for example, disproportionately affect low-income groups (Büchs et al., 2011), and subsidies for rooftop solar panels may disproportionately benefit high-income households (OECD, 2021). Social policy is also not always ecologically just, as we see with dominant definitions of well-being that are directly connected to material prosperity (Hirvilammi and Helne, 2014), or some labour market policies that focus on creating full employment regardless of whether this is through green or brown jobs (Bohnenberger, 2022a, 2022b).

A further tension relates to the question of scale. It is increasingly clear that the ecological crisis is a global crisis requiring global solutions; the social and care crisis too is exacerbated through specific tendencies within the global political economy. Many environmental problems and issues require border-transcending action and policy (O'Neill, 2009: 34 ff.). Yet the welfare state is a national creation – albeit with international relations of dependence and exploitation. As Meadowcroft highlights (Meadowcroft, 2005: 12), ‘a nationally oriented eco state seems almost a contradiction in terms’.

Mandelli's (2022) eco-social growth trilemma is a useful starting point from which to explore these tensions and how they may be resolved in policymaking. For example, a green growth approach or the SDGs see the trilemma as resolvable (a win-win-win) through policy integration (Koehler, 2016). Underpinning this is the repurposing of growth as green growth: economic growth can be decoupled from its environmentally detrimental impact by increasing efficiency and through shifts towards a knowledge-based economy benefiting from technological innovation (Jacobs, 2016). Using Mandelli's (2022) model, policy field integration would either be neutral, where there is no perceived relationship, or based on synergy, where progress in one field automatically also leads to progress in another field. In contrast, post- or de-growth positions argue that integration and resolving the eco-social growth trilemma is not possible within the given frameworks; instead, they draw attention to necessary trade-offs, where progress in one field means regression in another, and subsequent hierarchical policymaking outcomes. De- and post-growth positions tend to reject economic growth as a guiding principle of policymaking, and propose radical measures to decommodify nature and labour, by giving primacy to the social-environment nexus over economic issues (Mandelli, 2022). As Schoyen et al. (2022) suggest, policymakers will need to prioritise one of these, and a hierarchical organisation may emerge.

Although a useful starting point, what is missing from this framework, reflecting our concern with eco-social policy in general, is a recognition of the pre-existing power relations and structuring conditions of the global political economy that mediate these spheres. O’Connor (2006) addresses this by introducing the political as a fourth sphere; yet for him, the political is a sphere in itself, in which processes of system regulation through political organisation occur. Such a perspective, although moving towards a more relational or mediating understanding of the political, does not fully capture the nature of the global political economy as an already structured playing field. This is perhaps what de- and post-growth models are suggesting in their presumption that the economic field – specifically global capitalism – may be fundamentally incompatible with ecologically and socially just policy. We suggest that the political is not a separate sphere or reducible to formal politics, but is instead a necessary lens through which to draw out how each policy field and the ways in which they relate are themselves political terrains.

What is clear in these debates and policy proposals is that while there is an acknowledgement of crisis, there is little agreement on the policy solutions proposed. There is no coherent analysis of the relationship between the social, ecological and economic, nor explicit systematic engagement with the global political economy in which these policies will intervene. Since research into eco-social policy and sustainable welfare is often prescriptive, it avoids the question of how policies will be successfully implemented within a global political economy that is structured around unequal power relations. Moreover, while much of this discussion focuses on the state, there is less discussion on global actors such as IOs, even though IOs increasingly connect environmental and social policy issues (Kaasch and Schulze Waltrup, 2021). We seek to intervene in these discussions by focusing on points of contradiction at the global level between these three inter-related spheres. In the following section we will show how we do this, through the use of nodal points as a methodological premise from which to explore ongoing debates on agricultural subsidies.

Method

In order to focus on these tensions by examining a concrete case, we suggest that it is useful to start from specific nodal points in the global political economy, where these tensions are most present and cannot be avoided. Reflecting conjunctural analyses (Koivisto and Lahtinen, 2012), a nodal point can be thought of as a knot that requires untangling, where certain tendencies and contradictions that shape the global political economy and/or policymaking field can no longer be papered over. Starting from such temporal, spatial and/or thematic points allows us to untangle the different rationalities, interests and discourses that shape that moment, in our case eco-social policy as an emerging policy field.

While nodal points allow us to draw out the structuring conditions and crisis tendencies, engagement with discourse analysis allows us to link the material with the ideational. By tracing the discursive shifts within IOs, we can study how global policy models are reconstituted, reproduced, or changed in processes of knowledge generation. We can examine more closely ‘historically specific rules – embedded in language, practices and objects’ (Tag, 2013: 33). In other words, we focus on the semantic processes that increase the likelihood that certain policy models will be accepted by recipients (Tag, 2013: 33). A crucial objective is to reconstruct the relationship between political strategy and discursive changes, by decoding certain assumptions and examining the often concealed causal relationship between discursive practices and more general social and cultural structures (Fairclough, 2010). We explore, for example, a new emerging consensus on agricultural subsidies among some IOs, and the concurrent obscuring of the structures and groups that benefit from this consensus. As Fairclough suggests (Fairclough, 2010), these discourses are being naturalised and depoliticised, and thus depicted as serving the general – rather than particular – interest.

Moving to our case, agriculture is a nodal point in that it is mediated by the social, ecological and economic spheres: food access, quality and cost are clearly issues of social welfare and social security, while at the same time agriculture is responsible for 20 to 30 % (some say closer to 50 %) of human-caused GHG emissions (Vermeulen et al., 2012). Agricultural production shapes land and waterscapes; 70 % of fresh water and 40 % of land area is being used for agriculture (Braimoh, 2013), while agriculture is also a key driver of deforestation (Smith et al., 2007). It is also a main driver of climate change, while at the same time being vulnerable to climate change due to dependencies on, for example, fertile soil. In addition, over 2.5 billion people worldwide depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. Agricultural expansion and intensification have also been linked to new diseases potentially impacting public health (Rohr et al., 2019). Reducing agricultural emissions will be a challenge for the food system, at a time when demand for food is increasing and the world is facing a looming food crisis (due to geo-political, environmental and logistical issues, alongside labour shortages).

Agricultural subsidies are a way for specific states to remain competitive in the global market, while bolstering rural economies and the social structures they support. Yet they also tend to subsidise mono-industrial crops that destroy local eco-systems. Turning to scale, agriculture is also necessarily local – it is dependent upon the nuances of local ecology and is incredibly vulnerable to climate change – but at the same time it is one of the most globalised commodity chains in the global political economy. It is both global and local, while also being social, economic and ecological. Agriculture and its subsidies form a policy space that requires ecological, social and economic considerations, where although synergies can and do exist, so do clear trade-offs, often resulting in a hierarchical approach to the trilemma. Because of these complexities, it offers a useful case to explore how the trilemma is being worked out in practice.

To draw attention to the global dimension, our analysis focuses on IOs, in particular the FAO, the World Bank and the IFAD. These organisations were chosen as they are key actors in agricultural policy and hold discursive power within international debates on these topics. We analysed key documents produced by these organisations between 2007 and 2022, to trace the shifting discourses over this period. We excluded case-studies, single-author opinions and regional reports, and instead focused on flagship reports, as these captured the key positions of each organisation. Reaching a point of data saturation (argument repetition), we carried out a close discursive analysis of eleven documents (World Bank: 5; IFAD: 3; FAO: 3, see Appendix 1). In the analysis we used thematic coding to draw out the shifting approaches to agricultural subsidies (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Gibbs, 2018). The direct quotations in the following analysis were chosen because they are illustrative of the key themes that emerged. This approach allowed us to trace the way in which the ecological, social and economic crises have been understood through the lens of agriculture, alongside the proposed policy responses, in particular the more often hierarchical response to the eco-social growth trilemma. This analysis was carried out in Atlas.ti.

Case: The repurposing of agricultural subsidies

As we will show in the following analysis, many of the IOs have called for agricultural subsidies to be ‘repurposed’. They argue that current agricultural support from high-income countries is primarily directed at specific commodities such as beef, milk and rice, and has several negative impacts: it hinders climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, restricts access to nutritious food for the poor and creates trade and production imbalances. A solution is to promote the production of socially and environmentally sustainable products. For high-income countries or regions such as the EU, harmful and distorting support should be replaced with non-production-based support, investment in public goods and services, and incentives to produce nutritious products.

As stated, there is a clear recognition amongst most actors that shape global agriculture policy that the sector faces multiple crises, including climate change, labour shortages, a lack of necessary inputs and diminishing crop quality. However, despite a common recognition that these crises exist, there is little consensus on the solutions put forward, or, in other words, how agriculture and agricultural subsidies should be repurposed. One emerging approach to agricultural production, dominant within IOs, is the concept of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). CSA mirrors the green growth narrative, by seeking to increase economic output while also boosting climate change mitigation and adaptation (Newell and Taylor, 2018: 113). It is proposed that this will occur through increasing crop productivity and the reduction of GHG emissions, alongside improved resilience to climate change, in other words, intensification, adaptation and mitigation (Taylor, 2018). Reflecting the dominant economic orthodoxy, one central proposal regards the use of technology alongside the creation of new markets through the expansion and protection of property rights. CSA works within the given status quo, reproducing existing policy logics of marketisation and the creation of new privately owned technology (Clapp et al., 2018: 83). However, there is still no questioning of the fundamentals of industrial production, the underlying politics of such proposals, or the global infrastructure including the necessity of fossil fuels for the global agricultural supply chain (Newell and Taylor, 2018; Oosterveer and Sonnenfeld, 2012). Terms such as mitigation, adaptation and resilience strengthen the sense that structural or systemic change is not necessary and instead that the crisis can offer new opportunities as ‘climate change is transformed into new sites for capital accumulation’ (Clapp et al., 2018: 84).

Moving to agricultural subsidies, we see a similar logic at work. Overall, as we explore in the following paragraphs, we see a discursive shift from criticism of the existing subsidy regime as distorting the market, negatively impacting global agricultural trade, while also encouraging inefficient crops and agricultural practices (Taylor 2018), to discourse on the need to ‘repurpose’ agricultural subsidies in support of CSA (Gautam et al., 2022: 46). There is an acknowledgement that intensified production at lower costs usually increases environmental degradation and thus the productive capacity of land (FAO et al., 2021: 22). For example, the FAO (2021: VII) estimates that global agricultural support to producers amounts to US$540 billion a year while ‘two-thirds of this support is considered price-distorting and largely harmful to the environment’. Already in 2007, the World Bank's World Development Report reflected a similar concern that subsidies were problematic for both the market and the environment, and could increase vulnerability to external shocks for the poorest:

The first step in this is to get the incentives right by strengthening property rights and removing subsidies that encourage the degradation of natural resources. Also, the imperative is adapting to climate change, which will hit poor farmers the hardest— and hit them unfairly because they have contributed little to its causes (World Bank, 2007: 2).

This report went on to call for subsidies to be de-coupled from specific commodities, as what was ‘needed now is a rapid shift to less-distorting decoupled support for export products important to developing countries, particularly cotton’ (World Bank, 2007: 98).

While following a similar line, the IFAD and FAO's critique of subsidies is somewhat more nuanced. For example, the FAO states that while subsidies tend to incentivise monocultures and the phasing out of certain traditional and nutritious products (FAO, 2022: XX), they have also led to increased productivity and reduced prices of certain cereals (maize, wheat and rice) and animal products (especially beef and milk), which has resulted in increased food security and farm incomes, as well as facilitating technological innovation (FAO, 2022). Re-framed through a health and social security lens, the FAO calls for all trade barriers on nutritious food to be removed, in order to reduce prices and address issues of hunger and nutrition (FAO, 2022).²

By 2022, however, the World Bank had also shifted to a more nuanced position, suggesting that subsidies should be ‘repurposed’ in order to address the ecological and social crises. In its 2022 report ‘Repurposing Agricultural Policies and Support’, it continues to call for trade-distorting subsidies to be removed, but at the same time states that ‘repurposing support toward targeted productivity investments has the potential to deliver large gains through improved economic efficiency, reduced environmental impacts, and better health outcomes’ (Gautam et al., 2022: 54). The report goes further in defining repurposing as follows:

Repurposing: In this scenario, a portion of current domestic support would be repurposed for increased spending on green innovations; that is, the development, diffusion, and adoption of new technologies that both reduce emissions and raise productivity. The remainder would be returned to taxpayers and would be potentially available to deliver as nondistorting transfers to producers and other stakeholders. This could be used to compensate them for potential losses due to this reform, and to spend on rural infrastructure and other essential public goods and services that are fostering agricultural and rural development (Gautam et al., 2022: XV).

The repurposing of subsidies is a critical discursive shift and is also a term explicitly referred to by the FAO, which argues that although withdrawing fiscal subsidies would reduce environmentally degrading land use, it could also push more people into extreme poverty and undernourishment (FAO et al., 2021: XIII). Therefore, rather than eliminating all subsidies, subsidies should be repurposed for social and ecological benefits, especially in low-income countries. Repurposing is approached from an ecological-health-economic perspective. As the FAO suggests:

Repurposing is defined in this report as a reduction in agricultural producer support measures that are inefficient, unsustainable and /or inequitable, in order to replace them with support measures that are the opposite. This means agricultural producer support is not eliminated but reconfigured. In this way, repurposing will always imply reforming (FAO et al., 2021: XVI).

This could also include subsidies to enhance innovation and competitiveness, targeted at low-income or resource-poor producers.

Interestingly, there is a marked shift from subsidising production – often coupled to specific commodities – to subsidising consumption and food security. Consumption subsidies are understood as social protection programmes and food subsidies that reduce the cost of food. These include, for example, ‘transfers to commercial buyers (e.g. millers, processors) and other food value chain actors (e.g. transporters, storage service providers)’ (FAO, 2022: 82). Food subsidies should be designed to make food affordable for consumers or specific population groups, and should target specific food items that would improve nutritional outcomes and decrease poverty (FAO, 2022: 61). While cash transfers are perceived to be the most efficient measure to combat poverty and malnutrition, other examples are school feeding programmes or food vouchers. Therefore, one key part of ‘repurposing’ is to adopt ‘direct payments targeting poor and low-income households [using the fiscal savings from the repurposing of other resources]’ (FAO et al., 2021: 123). A focus on consumption could also include legislation on food marketing and the use of transparent nutrition labelling practices, alongside public food procurement policies and taxation of energy-dense and low-nutrition food (FAO, 2022: 87, 2022: 111).

Alongside a focus on consumption, there is also a call for production subsidies to be decoupled (i.e. no longer tied to specific commodities). Subsidies should instead be connected to explicit environmental and nutrition conditionalities (FAO et al., 2021: 42). Decoupling, it is suggested, would mean they no longer distort markets and, instead, would promote ‘a more efficient allocation and use of resource’ (FAO et al., 2021: 24 f.). This approach could target general sector services, which are largely considered to be ‘the least distorting measures, and more likely to foster sustainability’ (FAO et al., 2021: 24).

The IFAD, like the World Bank and the FAO, criticises the existing subsidy regime, as it may ‘distort markets, reduce overall economic efficiency, lead to overproduction and create perverse health and environmental outcomes’ (IFAD, 2021: 46). It also criticises subsidies for specific commodities, especially those implemented by high-income countries: ‘Subsidies by richer countries for specific commodities have put producers from lower-income countries at a significant competitive disadvantage in both domestic and international markets’ (IFAD, 2021: 47). The subsidy regime needs to be fundamentally changed. However, rather than explicitly using the term ‘repurposing’, the IFAD instead focuses on how subsidies could be targeted at more environmentally and socially beneficial commodities.

Embedded within the repurposing discourse, and reflected in CSA, is a growing call for government intervention and increased public investment to support the required technological innovation. As the World Bank notes: ‘There appears to be great potential for achieving major gains on these fronts by repurposing support toward public investments that facilitate the widespread adoption of productivity-enhancing and emission-reducing technologies for agri-food systems’ (Gautam et al., 2022: XXI). Or, as the FAO puts it, ‘A “public money for public goods” approach could render subsidies to nutritious foods that are important for public health and environmental sustainability politically more feasible than past production-centred approaches’ (FAO, 2022: 120).

Discussion: A repurposing of what?

How can we make sense of this discursive shift, seen through the lens of the eco-social growth trilemma described by Mandelli (2022)? In broad terms, we can see that there is a recognition of how the economic, social and ecological spheres mediate agriculture, and that there will be certain synergies and trade-offs. In general, the idea of ‘repurposing subsidies’ acknowledges a need for change; there is some degree of crisis that must be resolved and maintaining the status quo is therefore unsustainable. By recognising that linking agricultural support to the adoption of environmentally friendly but lower-yielding farm practices could lead to a decrease in emissions, the World Bank also highlights that poor people will be hit hardest (Gautam et al., 2022: XVIII). Yet this recognition does not result in calls for systemic shifts; instead, each organisation employs strategies that continue to promote economic growth within existing market structures. There is a questioning of what counts as ecological and social (specifically what should be valued and how), but the economic sphere (with its tools and logics) remains sacrosanct. For example, ‘The repurposing option, which would redirect a part of domestic support toward targeted investments in technologies that are both productivity-enhancing and emissions-reducing, appears to hold the potential to deliver “triple wins” for a healthy planet, economy, and people’ (Gautam et al., 2022: XIX).

Unlike the World Bank, the FAO more explicitly recognises trade-offs for smallholder farmers and consumers (FAO et al., 2021: 22). It acknowledges that there are no win-win-win policies, yet proposes that social protection schemes such as cash transfers be employed to mitigate potential losses:

Shocks and stresses may cause disastrous damage to some actors, but also create opportunities for others to transform and grow. Such dynamics will always entail winners and losers – some actors may grow and others may perish. The important point is that, when supply chains are resilient, shocks and stresses should lead to improvement in their functioning and delivery as a whole. Subsequent socio-economic costs should be minimized through measures such as social protection or use of existing food stock (FAO, 2021: 85).

Although FAO et al. (2021: 103) explicitly invoke the notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ to push their policy agenda of repurposing agricultural subsidies, their policy proposals differ little from those of the World Bank, with still the same hierarchy and justification of certain trade-offs, such as the prioritisation of economic growth, technological progress and productivity. ‘[T]he development of agriculture’, they say, ‘as a core element of the food supply chain, offers opportunities for increasing productivity, off-farm employment, and linkages between agriculture and the rest of the economy, as well as for market integration and export expansion’ (FAO et al., 2021: 6), even though this might also create losers that would need to be compensated. Moreover, although they call for a ‘paradigm shift’, the policy proposed continues to work within the underlying power relations that structure the global political economy, closing off more transformative alternatives, such as post-growth agricultural proposals that pose a threat to the structuring conditions of global capitalism from which these organisations currently benefit (McGreevy et al., 2022).

This lack of systemic change is also captured in the role of the state and the arguments of Green Keynesianism. As shown in the previous section, the state and increased public investments are key to tapping into potential synergies by implementing ‘green conditionalities’ which could trigger new innovation processes (FAO et al., 2021: 120). Such public investments are especially crucial during economic crises, when many private actors are more risk-averse (FAO, 2022: 2). There is a growing recognition of the need for comprehensive government action and public policy, to counter the impacts of the market while also addressing the ecological consequences of social policy and the regressive effects of environmental policy (Tienhaara, 2018). Yet, and reflecting the limitations of repurposing as a whole, the role of the public sphere is still couched in the language of competition and marketisation, aiming at facilitating rather than challenging dominant economic management.

In order to understand why there appears to be such hesitancy to go beyond the status quo and the economic-dominated hierarchy, the concept of a ‘new critical orthodoxy’ developed by Brand et al. (2020) is particularly enlightening. For Brand et al. (2020), this new critical orthodoxy recognises that there are far-reaching problems such as social inequality or ecological collapse that require ‘transformative’ large-scale societal change. However, the solutions proposed operate through existing institutions and capitalist logics, which are assumed to be capable of solving contemporary crises and problems if only adapted in specific and limited ways (Brand et al., 2020: 163 f.). Repurposing is a good example of this. Certain actors, institutions and power relations remain unquestioned, which is problematic if it is perhaps these very actors, institutions and power relations that underpin many of the crises that we currently face. Hence, we see a constant return to a harnessing of crisis as an opportunity for new profitable investments and to further commodify nature or social services. Green Keynesianism also fits within this new critical orthodoxy, as neither the market nor growth are seen as inherently problematic. Rather, the state needs to re-affirm its control of the market, and there is no critical discussion on the state as a structured terrain of struggle that reproduces certain power constellations and environmental and social problems (Brand et al., 2020: 163 f.). Yet, and building on Brand et al., if we continue to avoid these systemic questions, we will fail to grasp the systemic causes of the crises, and our analysis will still not grasp why seemingly more transformative policy proposals are constantly repeated within dominant economic hierarchies.

This becomes particularly prescient when exploring the potential limitations of repurposing subsidies within the existing World Trade Organization (WTO) global trade regime. Although the agricultural system can only be transformed with ‘concerted global action’ (FAO et al., 2021: 46), such action is constrained by WTO rules and the commitments of member states. For example, increasing fiscal subsidies for nutritious products could be considered by the WTO as a trade-distorting practice. While not calling for a dismantling of the WTO rules, the FAO does see potential to ‘open a new chapter for agricultural trade negotiations at the WTO’ (FAO, 2022: 108), and pushes for WTO rules that allow subsidies to producers of nutritious food. Despite shifts in global discourses, the institutional frameworks continue to reassert the hierarchy of global economic development and trade at the expense of the social and ecological sphere.

Conclusion: Eco-social policy within the global political economy

Our analysis of agricultural subsidies has shown that although there are shifts in the ideas of how a decent economy must function and what kind of role the nation state has to play, this recognition of a need for change is mediated through existing structures and dominant logics. As Brand et al. (2020: 166) propose, the basic structures of capitalism are preserved. Moreover, the unequal exchange relations, based on a specific organisation of mass production and mass consumption (Brand and Wissen, 2018), between Global North and Global South remain, even if some discursive shifts have taken place within the institutional conditions through which capitalism is reproduced.

We suggest that these discursive limitations reflect the way that aspects of social security, such as access to healthy food, depend on the incumbent economic order, and how IOs apply ideas of social protection in ways that reproduce or adapt, but do not challenge, the structure of the global political economy. However, further research should focus on analysing the influence of global policy actors on regional and national level-players, such as the EU. Although these levels are part of and shaped by the global political economy, they retain some agency, adapting global scripts and pressures to their specific contexts. Moreover, although our approach, rooted in discourse theory and critical political economy, can analyse power and ideology, it cannot explain how the ‘repurposing agricultural subsidies’ discourse emerged. Future research should focus on the influential individuals behind this agenda and the process of policy formation.

In conclusion, we propose that crisis management through policymaking is never an ‘add and stir’ process. It is highly political, and minimising these complexities runs the risk of re-affirming rather than challenging existing unequal power relations and exploitative social structures. The political sphere is not separate; rather, it mediates the economic, the social and the ecological. Moreover, by prioritising the meso-level of policy formation, there is a tendency to obscure or avoid the structuring conditions of the global political economy within which policymaking occurs, thus once again concealing the underlying aforementioned politics and power structures. Without an explicit acknowledgement of the way in which logics and social relations such as competition, private property, growth, expropriation and exploitation shape our current world, the crisis tendencies that stem from these dynamics cannot be ‘policied away’. Moving forward, then, we propose that for the eco-social growth trilemma to be addressed, it is important to focus on the integral relation of each sphere and its position (power, opportunities and limitations) within the whole. In doing so, it becomes clear that with each new constellation, new contradictions can emerge: ultimately a consensus between economic growth, social policy and the environment has never and will never be fully achievable within global capitalism, a system that is orientated around the dominance of the economic, as we have illustrated based on the case of ‘repurposing agricultural subsidies’. Eco-social policy scholarship needs to be aware that environmental and social policy integration is always embedded within a specific global political economy. Hence, there will always be pressure from actors that benefit from such a global institutional set-up to reconfigure eco-social policy and resolve the trilemma in a way that serves and reproduces the incumbent global economic order.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the invaluable feedback received from numerous individuals during the development of this manuscript. The stimulating exchanges with people from the eco-social policy and sustainable welfare community have greatly influenced this work. In particular, we would like to thank John Berten, Milena Büchs, Martin Fritz, Alexandra Kaasch, Matthias Kranke, Jayeon Lee and Matteo Mandelli.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Robin Schulze Waltrup acknowledges the funding received from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (GRK 2225: World Politics).

ORCID iD

Robin Schulze Waltrup

Notes

Appendix 1. Material analysed

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