Understanding Complex Governance Relationships in Food Safety Regulation

What is it about?

In this article we discuss the value of the Regulatory Intermediaries framework (RIT model) for analyzing complex governance relationships in the regulation of food safety. The RIT model is about the analysis of regulatory interactions among actors beyond the dichotomy of regulators and targets (Abbott, Levi-Faur, and Snidal 2017). We examine the current landscape of food safety regulation through the lens of this model, addressing the question of what the model has to offer to the analysis of regulatory governance in that field. By exploring food safety regimes involving the European Union and the Global Food Safety Initiative, we highlight the diverse and complex relationships among the actors in public, private, and hybrid regimes of food safety regulation. We extend the basic RIT model to better fit the reality of (hybrid) governance relationships in the modern regulation of food safety, arguing that the model enables disaggregation of these regimes into analytical subunits or “regulatory chains,” in which each actor contributes to and affects the regulatory process. Finally, we critically assess what the RIT model adds to alternative theoretical approaches in identifying, mapping, and explaining the different roles actors play vis-à-vis others in regulatory regimes.

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Why is it important?

The Regulatory Intermediaries project rightly broadens the scope of research and analysis in regulatory governance beyond rule-making. This is a valuable contribution as the regulatory arena is populated not only by regulators and targets. Calling attention to regulatory intermediaries opens the black box of regulation and invites investigating what is happening in there. The field of food safety regulation seems to be crowded with regulatory intermediaries across different dimensions. Our analysis points to four major issues that we have sought to highlight using different spin-off models from the original linear R – I – T model: (i) There is a plurality of intermediaries, which can be either independent from each other or hierarchically organized, or related in much more complex ways. (ii) This plurality is manifest in the public and private regulatory context, and emerges too in hybrid regimes. (iii) Intermediaries (depending on their function) develop different relationships with regulators/targets, showing different degree of leniency towards these two. (iv) Intermediaries are chameleonic in the sense that they change color (function) depending on the relationship studied.

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