Fixing sustainability through technoscience and diversity: The case of EU agriculture policy

Sustainability is a conveniently vague boundary term with which a variety of interest groups can identify. Over time, it has grown together with a technoscientific paradigm which demands a closer look at how actors envision science, technology, digitization, and innovation to foster said sustainability, and how the latter has shifted as a result. Sustainability also continues to hold strong value and political weight in the EU, where technoscientific optimism has had a binding effect, particularly in efforts of environmental protection in agriculture (in light of the Green Deal), in an increasingly decentralized political union. This paper discusses these processes in the recent reform of the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP; 2023–2027) by focusing on the one hand on how sustainability’s three pillars – the environmental, the social, and the economic – are ‘reconciled,’ and on the other, on the new ‘eco-schemes’ as an instrument to achieve a more sustainable agriculture. Empirical data gleaned from participant observation, expert interviews and policy document analysis show how in EU agriculture policy science, digitization/technology and innovation are imagined as fixtures that cohere these pillars, thereby maintaining a growth paradigm imminent to dominant sustainability discourses. This technoscientific sustainability is also evident in agriculture measures on the ground, in the new eco-schemes, which offer a diversity of farming approaches for EU's member states, ranging from agroforestry to precision farming. In this technocratic instrument, holistic systems, like agroecology, are rendered technical ‘tools’ that member states can combine at will, fostering a politics of toolkit diversity that accommodates diverse farming approaches and philosophies while evading environmental compliance. Scientific epistemology, technical quantification, digital tools and innovation thus act as wider discursive fixture that not only hold together the holy trinity of sustainability, but also accommodates diverse landscapes and member states, and through that the political union of an increasingly decentralized EU.