Governing Agriculture or Farmers? Problem Representations of Biodiversity and Farm Loss in Swedens Strategy for the Common Agricultural Policy

ABSTRACT European Union (EU) strategies for food supply address challenges of increasing, or at least maintaining, today's level of agricultural food production. At the same time, European farmland biodiversity continues to deteriorate despite considerable investments in measures to promote environmentally friendly farming practices. In this paper, we analyse the Swedish strategy for the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and discuss how it represents biodiversity and farm loss. We apply Carol Bacchi's critical policy approach, What's the problem represented to be? (WPR), to identify how biodiversity and farm loss is problematised, and analyse what underlies this representation, as well as its possible consequences. The main results show that farmers’ shortcomings in skills, productivity and knowledge are represented as the main obstacles to change, resulting in an individualisation of the ‘problem’. The Swedish CAP Strategic Plan instead leaves systemic causes of farm‐ and biodiversity loss, such as market failures and other structural factors, unproblematised. This creates barriers to employing more pluralistic approaches to strengthen biodiversity, livelihoods and agricultural food production through policy and practice. Because CAP strategic plans are mandatory and follow a similar structure across all EU member states, this study's findings also offer insights relevant to other EU member states.