The Global Food Safety Initiative and state actors. Paving the way for hybrid food safety governance

摘要

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) plays a central role in the adoption and coordination of private food safety standards. In this chapter we discuss and analyse the strategy of GFSI to engage with national and international governmental actors and vice versa, with a focus on developments in the Netherlands, Canada, the United States and China. We analyze the incentives and obstacles for the different actors involved in aligning public and private transnational food governance. From the perspective of GFSI, the principal reason for engagement with public authorities, is to gain broad acceptance of its benchmarking process and recognized certification schemes. Engagement with state actors adds to the legitimacy of GFSI and is expected to contribute to the further rollout of GFSI’s meta-regulatory approach. State actors have two main arguments to engage with GFSI and related private governance arrangements in the food industry. They engage with a central global actor in the domain of private food standards in order to stress the importance and prevalence of public laws and enforcement. Another, less defensive argument is that public authorities seek to tap into the potential of private food safety schemes to contribute to public policy goals by improving food safety management systems, by ratcheting up training and auditing standards for food safety assurance industry, and by promoting a stronger professional food safety culture within industry. The result of the ongoing engagements is that food governance is increasingly multileveled, networked and thus hybrid in nature.