Agricultural Élites, Agrarian Beliefs, and Their Impact on the Evolution of Agri-Environment Policies: An Examination of the British Experience, 1981–92

Traditionally, agrarian beliefs have been assigned an important place in studies of the formative processes of agricultural policymaking. However, such work has tended to privilege these beliefs with a passive, conditioning, or reactive role in decisionmaking and decision taking. In this paper, we show that these deeply engrained notions also provide the basis for articulating more complex proactive strategies, aimed at advancing agricultural interests. We demonstrate how widely held agrarian beliefs in British society, relating to ‘trusteeship’ by farming of the natural environment, have been deployed by policy élites in the British Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) as a means of legitimising a suite of agri-environment policies to sectoral constituencies and the general public which are strongly supportive of both bureaucratic and producer group ambitions. We examine the impact of these beliefs on the formation by MAFF of the British negotiating position towards the European Union's ‘agri-environment’ regulation, EU 2078/92.