Effective governance of food safety regulation across EU Member States : Towards operationalization

This article seeks to make a contribution to the food safety regulation literature, and to the broader framework of risk regulation, in the attempt to establish both theoretically and empirically what can be intended as effective governance of food safety regulation. The aim is to review existing measures of effectiveness of food safety governance, and to give a preliminary definition of effectiveness, together with a theoretical perspective on how to operationalise it, eventually proposing an empirical measurement. Effectiveness of food safety governance can be measured – on the one hand – as the capacity of consumers’ protection, and thus, as the minimisation of risk related to food, and – on the other hand – as the capacity of protection of producers’ interests, in order to ensure competitiveness within the market. Distinguishing food safety delivered from food safety perceived, the article seeks to analyse dimensions of effectiveness related to both the protection of consumers and producers, and to the minimisation of risk, drawing upon Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD) and, particularly, her conceptualisation of opportunistic behaviour.