Revitalizing public policy approaches to the EU: ‘territorial institutionalism’, fisheries and wine

Abstract: This article proposes a reinvestment in political sociology in general, and the concept of territory in particular, as means of renewing analysis of the policy-polity dialectic at the heart of the European Union (EU). Drawing on a sociological theory of decision-making and sectoral regulation, the foundations for a 'territorial institutionalist' approach are developed in order to study political usages of territory. Specifically, the process of the 'political assignment of authority' is examined to analyse three such usages in EU fisheries and wine: justifying frontiers of policy instruments, defining actor eligibility, politicizing/depoliticizing regulatory controversies. Overall, we argue that EU studies must re-engage in epistemological debates over policy-polity linkages in order to produce new and rigorous knowledge about European integration and its legitimization. For, as our findings suggest, these processes are not driven by the certainty of 'rational' multi-level governance, but are mediated within sectoral 'institutional orders'.

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