Multiple streams in EU policy-making: the case of the 2005 sugar reform

Abstract

The multiple streams model, developed by Kingdon in the United States (US), is being adapted increasingly to study European Union (EU) policy-making. This, however, is revealing a theoretical underdevelopment in some of its central components. The present paper considers several concerns. It seeks to develop the idea of policy entrepreneurship as a context-specific activity that gives substance to the claim that 'ideas have their time'; it interprets the key notion of ambiguity, in the EU context, to mean institutional ambiguity; and it allows for spillovers between policy areas to be endogenous as well as exogenous. This affects the nature of the policy windows wherein policy entrepreneurship occurs. The adapted multiple streams model is used to analyse the 2005 EU sugar policy reform. Institutional ambiguity and endogenous spillovers are shown to create the conditions that enabled active policy entrepreneurship to lead, ultimately, to reform of this most resilient of policies.

Ambiguity, multiple streams, and EU policy

“…The role of specific policy entrepreneurs needs careful delineation from the broader process of policy entrepreneurship (see, inter alia, Mintrom and Norman 2009;Ackrill and Kay 2011). Further, given the frequent identification in the extant literature of 'the Commission' (usually as a singular entity) as a policy entrepreneur, this challenges the idea of entrepreneurs being located outside of decision-making processes (although such an idea is consistent if the MSF is viewed solely as a means of analysing agenda-setting, but not decision-making).…”

Policy Coherence for Development in the European Union: Do New Procedures Unblock or Simply Reproduce Old Disagreements?

“…Guarded by a closed policy community, the EU's sugar policy had remained essentially unaltered through three rounds of CAP reform (Ackrill and Kay 2011). However, by the early millennium reform became unavoidable.…”

“…2. For an explanation of the endogenous and exogenous pressures which eventually placed reform of the EU's sugar regime on the political agenda in the early millennium see Ackrill and Kay (2011). 3.…”

“…During the 1990s when development NGOs began campaigning against the apparent incoherence between the CAP and the EU's development objectives (Hoebink 2001;Mathews 2008), a closed policy community kept change off the agenda (Ackrill and Kay 2011). Consequently, the EU's sugar policy escaped several rounds of CAP reform relatively unscathed.…”

“We cannot let this happen again”: reversing UK flood policy in response to the Somerset Levels floods, 2014

“…Kingdon's (1995) thesis on policy change, known as the Multiple Streams Framework, offers a heuristic for understanding how and why environmental policies gain or lose political support in fields such as climate change (Keskitalo et al 2013;Pralle 2009), flood risk (Johnson et al 2005;Penning-Rowsell et al 2006), and food production (Ackrill & Kay 2011). For Kingdon, a major crisis can act as a catalyst for change, opening up 'windows of opportunity' that allow new ideas, or existing ones, to jump up the policy agenda as the three streams: (i) defining what is the problem, (ii) identifying what are the policy responses, and (iii) the politics of the situation at hand, all converge.…”