Topic
A configurational perspective on the EU Green Deal: an IGT application

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.