POLICY NETWORKS AND POLICY CHANGE IN ORGANIC AGRICULTURE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE UK AND IRELAND ALAN GREER This paper takes a comparative case-study approach, located within the literature on policy networks, to organic agriculture policy in the United Kingdom and Ire- land since the late 1980s. An examination of policy development for the organic sector focuses primarily on regulatory arrangements. The core of the analysis applies some prominent themes in the policy network literature to the organic sec- tor: the debate about sectoral and sub-sectoral networks, the relationship between networks, context and outcomes, and the role of the state and ideas in promoting policy change. INTRODUCTION: POLICY NETWORKS AND AGRICULTURAL POLICY Agricultural policy has provided fertile ground for the empirical testing of explanatory ideas about the nature of the policy-making process. The policy networks approach is now the dominant analytical paradigm, not only in accounts of British agricultural policy but further afield (see for example Jordan, Maloney and McLaughlin 1994; Smith 1992, 1990; Daugbjerg 1998; Adshead 1996; Collins 1995). The agricultural sector has also provided the empirical battlefield for the long-running argument in British political science about the explanatory utility of the policy networks approach (see Marsh and Smith 2001, 2000; Dowding 2001). The analysis adopts a comparative case-study perspective to the organic agriculture policy sector in the UK and Ireland, located within the general policy networks approach. Here policy networks are defined primarily in the British/American tradition as a generic label that encapsulates a variety of forms of interest intermediation such as policy communities and issue networks (Marsh 1998a; Rhodes and Marsh 1992b). The approach is used both as a heuristic device – a ‘sensible way of analysing and categorizing relations between state actors and other interests’ – and as an explanatory tool for policy analysis (Marsh 1998b, pp. 186 and 190). ORGANIC AGRICULTURE POLICY Although the roots of the organic agriculture movement can be traced back to the 1920s, rapid expansion of the sector has occurred only since the mid- Alan Greer is Reader in Politics, University of the West of England, Bristol. Public Administration Vol. 80 No. 3, 2002 (453–473)  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.