Fields of possibility: rural environmental governance in Northern Ireland after Brexit

This opportunity occurred across each of the four nations of the UK with both agricultural and environmental policy devolved powers.<br><br>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.<br><br>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.