An Analysis of Standards‐based Regulation in the EU Organic Sector, 1991–2007

Against the background of a discussion of recent analyses of capitalist subsumption of agriculture and of neo‐liberalism, the paper uses a ‘liberal governmentality’ framework to trace the development of the EU Regulation on organic agriculture from its adoption in 1991 to its recent repeal and replacement in 2007. The central argument is that regulatory development took the form of a cycle of elaboration, tightening, increasing deviation and finally a ‘return to principles’ in order to reduce deviation. At different stages in this cycle, different groups of ‘stakeholders’, including experts, were influential. Likewise, different forms of expertise became dominant or were sidelined. Meanwhile, ‘capital’ in its different incarnations remained marginal throughout. The paper leaves open the questions of the generalizability of this analysis to regulatory arenas other than the EU, as well as to regulatory objects more central than organic agriculture to capitalist accumulation.