Giulia Bazzan, Copenhagen University, Denmark
On 11 December 2019, the European Commission adopted the Communication on the European Green Deal. This Communication reset the EC’s commitment to tackling climate and environmental-related challenges and set out a number of related strategies: a Farm-to-Fork strategy, a Biodiversity strategy, a proposal for a Climate Law, and a new action plan for the Circular Economy. Decisions about how to structure and implement such strategies can have a significant impact on their eventual success or failure in supporting a shift towards more sustainable food systems across the European Union. In this paper, I apply the Institutional Grammar (in its latest version of IG 2.0) and the rule-based typology developed by Sue Crawford and Elinor Ostrom, grounded in the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. In the IAD, institutions are rules that shape the so-called action situations, the social spaces where individuals interact, and actions take place. Against this background, I adopt a configurational approach to assess the EU Green Deal policy design and the resulting action situation, highlighting constitutive and regulative statements and mapping their structures and relationships.
