Assessing the Implications of Brexit for Evidence, Expertise and Agri-food Regulatory Governance in the UK

The decision by the United Kingdom (UK) to leave the European Union (EU) after nearly five decades of membership (Brexit) presents numerous implications for the UK’s agri-food sector. The EU, over the decades, evolved into a regulatory state, with its rules and institutions dictating most of the activities in the UK’s agri-food sector. EU policies and regulations, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), controlled most of the agri-food activities in the UK, from agronomy to trade. EU institutions such as the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) were also responsible for producing scientific evidence and setting standards for the sector. Consequently, Brexit has major implications for the future trajectory of the UK’s agri-food sector.
Brexit also represents a novel case for EU studies and (dis)integration literature since this is the only time a member state has left the Union. Thus, a new methodological and analytical framework is warranted to explain the future relationship between the EU and its former member. This thesis refines the concepts of de-Europeanisation, dismantling, the Brussels effect, and global factors to provide a novel analytical framework to analyse the post-Brexit regulatory relationships between the EU and the UK. It analyses the drivers and constraints for the UK dismantling EU regulations and/or divergence from the EU’s regulatory regimes. It also examines the capacity of the UK’s scientific advisory and regulatory institutions to ensure sustainability in the agri-food sector post-Brexit.
The thesis concludes that Brexit and the new UK-EU agreements give the UK the autonomy to diverge from the EU’s agri-food regulatory regimes. However, the larger market size of the EU, path dependencies such as high supply chain linkages, and some aspects of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) will reinforce the so-called ‘Brussels effect’ to draw the UK close to the EU.