From Policy Insider to Policy Outcast? Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles, EU Policymaking, and the EU's ‘Agri-Environment’ Regulation

Recent studies of the role of lobby groups in European Union (EU) policymaking have drawn attention to the concept of ‘multilevel governance’ as a powerful explanatory tool in analysing how these organisations exert political influence on EU institutions. One of the longest standing of these groups is the Comité des Organisations Professionnelles Agricoles (COPA). Until the mid-1980s, COPA was regarded as being remarkably successful in influencing the content and direction of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), More recently, however, commentators have noted a marked decline in COPA's influence, citing as evidence the organisation's abortive attempts to blunt the radical edge of the 1992 reform package of the Common Agricultural Policy. In this paper the authors use Grande's conception of multilevel governance to provide a thorough examination of why COPA carried little influence with the European Commission's Agriculture Directorate, Directorate-General VI (DGVI) during the 1992 reforms. An illustrative case study is presented of a minor though notable element of these reforms, the so-called ‘agri-environment’ regulation, EU 2078/92. In explaining COPA's slight effect on the final text of the regulation, Grande's notion of multilevel governance emphasises the eclectic positions adopted by COPA's constituent farming unions towards the regulation, and the complexities of a negotiating process transacted simultaneously with different EU institutions, each requiring the tailoring of specific lobbying strategies by COPA's secretariat. The authors conclude that the negative outcome of COPA's lobbying resulted not only from disarray among this organisation's national policy constituencies, but also from skillful counterlobbying mounted by DGVI to prevent COPA from derailing the delicate CAP reform process.