EFFECTIVE GOVERNANCE DESIGNS OF FOOD SAFETY REGULATION: EVIDENCE FROM 15 EU COUNTRIES

This research investigates differences in effectiveness of food safety regulation across the EU countries and explains them by differences in domestic governance design. The focus is justified by a pragmatic consideration, inspired by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD: Ostrom 2005, 2011): although policy effectiveness more directly depends on a wide array of noninstitutional factors, the institutional dimension of governance is the one on which intervention is relatively easier, and that shapes actors’ strategies and endowments. Drawing on this tenet, this work asks which institutional features of the national governance design make food safety regulation effective. Given the configurational nature of institutional effects (Ostrom, 1986), Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is the suitable technique to find out the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with high / low effectiveness of food safety regulation. To emphasize the effects of governance designs, the study narrows on those Member States in which the implementation of the European reform has consolidated (with the Regulation 178/2002). As all the Member States accessing the EU in 2004 and 2007 have this regulatory system still in the making – the Central and Eastern European Countries, but also Malta and Cyprus – this research identifies its scope condition in the EU 15, i.e. the countries that joined the European Union before 2004. Results show that capacity plays a prominent role for an effective response, unfolding its effect in combination with an integrated model of distribution of the regulatory functions.