The Rise of Transnational Private Meta-Regulators

Abstract

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Public Private Partnerships in food industries: A road to success?

“…However, this literature, depending on the discipline (economics, sociology, political science) uses multiple concepts -albeit blurred -to name these collaborations: co-regulation, enforced self-regulation, meta-regulation, hybrid regulation and so on. This abundance of terms led to a fuzzy understanding of these collabo-rations depending on the analyses' focus: their emergence (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010;Coglianese and Mendelson, 2010), the risks of regulatory capture and loss of transparency (Verbruggen and Havinga, 2014), etc. As suggested by Verbruggen and Havinga (2015a,b), one common feature of this literature is that these collaborations are an output of the regulatory/political process (standard-setting, implementation, enforcement and monitoring) and appear as a mean to comply with a regulatory standard.…”

“…Recent contributions have also mentioned the presence of these collaborative arrangements in developing a sustainable seafood industry while they have not been linked to food safety (Oosterveer, 2015). In the context of developing countries, Narrod et al (2009) In the food safety literature, scholars mostly consider these arrangements as the result of a regulatory change (GarciaMartinez et al, 2007;Rouvière and Caswell, 2012;Verbruggen and Havinga, 2014). In this perspective, these programmes are implemented as regulatory tools in order to enforce newly designed food safety standards or traceability systems (GarciaMartinez et al, 2007(GarciaMartinez et al, , 2013Rouvière and Caswell, 2012).…”

Private Food Safety Standards in the EU

“…A transnational food safety standard supported by multinational food manufacturers is the Food Safety System Certification 22000 (FSSC).4 Together these four transnational standards issued more than 200,000 certificates.5 These standards are benchmarked by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI). The GFSI is an industry-driven initiative providing guidance on food safety management systems and a global platform for communication to improve food safety (see on GFSI Fagotto 2017;Havinga & Verbruggen 2017;Verbruggen & Havinga 2016). GFSI is set up and run by representatives of some of the powerful global retailers and food manufacturers.…”

Food Safety Meta-Controls in the Netherlands

“…Both public and private actors may act as meta-regulators by exerting influence on or setting conditions for regulatory activities, whether such activities be standard-setting, monitoring or enforcement (Scott 2012, Verbruggen andHavinga 2014b). In this sense, meta-control is a form of meta-regulation that focuses on the activities of monitoring and enforcement in a regulatory regime.…”

“…In this sense, meta-control is a form of meta-regulation that focuses on the activities of monitoring and enforcement in a regulatory regime. Although here we focus merely on meta-controls exercised by the public enforcement agency NVWA on two national private food safety control systems, the concepts of meta-regulation and meta-control -in our view -not only involve the regulation of private systems by public actors, but also, conversely the regulation of public regimes by private actors (Scott 2002), as well as the regulation of public and private actors among themselves (Verbruggen and Havinga 2014b). …”