Logics of productivism and profit in rural environmental governance post-Brexit

The field of critical policy analysis through its embrace of the post-structuralist turn has offered a variety of strategies for analysing policy change (or lack thereof). What has struggled to emerge is a theory of governance that works coherently with these strategies and conceptions of policy change.

The concept of Hegemonic Governance emerging out of Political Discourse Theory may offer such a theoretically coherent alternative with an actionable research strategy. Glynos et al (2015) in their respective analyse of financial sector reform and healthcare reform sought to develop a method of policy analysis using Political Discourse Theory in a systematic way, and thus developed a nodal framework. This framework was attended for the analysis of public service provision and the contestation around it.

This paper demonstrate how the nodal framework can be re-articulated to offer an analysis of the changes (or lack thereof) in rural environmental governance, underpinned by Political Discourse Theory’s hegemonic governance concept. The case study for this paper is Northern Ireland’s rural environmental governance, and the project social logics for a post-Brexit environmental governance regime. With over 1000 days without an executive the governing authorities have been attempting to navigate the development of post-Brexit authority and the necessary changes to environmental governance to deal with the present crisis, By including a range of political actors Northern Ireland has presented the perfect opportunity as a case study to illustrate this conception of governance.