Revisiting the “Technichal” European Green Deal and the Agri-Food system through the relational approach. An Ontological, Epistemological, and Legal Exploration

Walckiers, Pierre
(2024) Revisiting the European Green Deal” Conference by the Natolin Energy and Climate Nest — Location: Warsaw (20.June.2024)

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In the context of the technological revolution in food systems, this paper argues that this "technicization" of agricultural practices also extends to a "technicization" of their political justifications. Embedded within a "technical/scientific narrative," the European Green Deal (EGD), its Farm to Fork (F2F), and Biodiversity Strategy present new technologies as part of promises for the efficient and sustainable use of food systems, particularly in the face of climate change challenges. While agricultural policies have traditionally been analyzed through the lens of exceptionalist and post-exceptionalist justifications, we identify the use of technical/scientific narratives to justify and even depoliticize agricultural policies. With this scientific/technical narrative, these new technologies are presented as promises for a sustainable world, even as the only rational solutions, or the objective and universal continuity of agricultural practices. However, these justifications and scientific approaches rationalize and objectify a Western vision of the world and of science (where nature is put at a distance, as functional objects to be valorized), which is specific to and not shared by the agricultural environment. In response, various scientific, civic, and decolonial movements have contested the technical and dualist hegemony of agricultural approaches. These answers are analyzed within the framework of Relational theories, which investigate legal constructs that safeguard our virtuous relations with the environment without predefining these connections, and support epistemic openness, encompassing traditional, relational, experimental, and citizen knowledge on agriculture. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, incorporating the narrative policy framework and political philosophy, this article analyzes the technical/scientific narratives of EU Agrifood and climate policies (particularly EGD, F2F). Criticism of the epistocratic effects of these technical/scientific narratives on the political sphere, a “relational” redefinition of the political will be presented, primarily drawing on the works of Latour and Castoriadis.
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Walckiers, P. (2024). Revisiting the “Technichal” European Green Deal and the Agri-Food system through the relational approach. An Ontological, Epistemological, and Legal Exploration. Revisiting the European Green Deal” Conference by the Natolin Energy and Climate Nest, Warsaw. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/216794