Fields of possibility

: rural environmental governance in Northern Ireland after Brexit

Abstract

Brexit offered an opportunity to completely re-evaluate the governance of the countryside across the UK for the first time in 50 years as the UK left the European Union, in particular the constraints of the Common Agriculture Policy. This opportunity occurred across each of the four nations of the UK with both agricultural and environmental policy devolved powers.

As the Brexit process created this field of opportunity for re-organising Northern Ireland’s rural environmental governance it is important to consider how and why environmental governance has changed since the Brexit process began in 2016. This thesis shows that alongside the asymmetrical relationship with the UK Government, the focus of Chapter 2, a key driver of policy was a discourse which existed prior to Brexit in a rudimentary form in Northern Ireland’s agri-food sector dominated policy networks: Sustainable Productivism.

With the repatriation of a wide range of powers, Sustainable Productivism was able to take a fuller form and solidify its hegemony through the production of a wide array of policies, strategies and frameworks which (re?)formed rural environmental governance in Northern Ireland. In Chapter 3 this thesis builds a novel political discourse theory approach to governance to capture this hegemonic discourse and its practical ramifications for policy by first testing it in an analysis of England’s Environmental Land Management Scheme in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 and 6 it identifies and describes this hegemonic discourse as it becomes a cohesive set of demands during the Brexit process, and it identifies the logics through which it governs, and the actors which articulate/sustain it. Chapter 7, identifies and analyses the immediate challenges to the hegemony of Sustainable Productivism. It concludes, in Chapter 8, that Brexit, and the post-Brexit crises of Climate Change and Covid-19, have been a missed opportunity for Northern Ireland to envision the future.

Date of Award	Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	The Northern Ireland and North East Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Lee McGowan (Supervisor) & Viviane Gravey (Supervisor)