Governing and Governance in the Agri-Food Sector and Traceability

Abstract

In this chapter food governance is depicted as a dynamic process, both occurring across and involving actors from the public sector, the corporate sector and civil society. Governing has given way to governance in the sense that private governance forms are increasingly enrolled and recognized by the state. Indeed public governance can follow in the wake of initiatives pioneered in the private sector. Governance according to this interpretation thus hybridizes public forms of governing with private schemes of governance. This approach to understanding the nature of governance provides a context for further evaluation of the differing but overlapping forms of agri-food traceability that were introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. The political and institutional policy contexts for traceability are located within a multilevel governance framework for food reaching up from national (and sub-national, or local and regional) to European and global levels, and involving a multiplicity of attentive actors from across the public, corporate and non-governmental sectors. The core of this dynamic is the interaction of public and private governance schemes in the agri-food sector which can result in new governance forms for agrifood standards. The interpretations and conceptualizations of governance and the forms that governance can take are examined more closely in the next section, followed by some illustrations of the dynamics of governance in the agri-food sector, drawing particularly upon some selected recent experiences in the UK and the EU and at the global-international levels around standards setting. A model of food governance operating across public, corporate and civil society sectors and at multilevels is presented (see also Barling, 2004; Lang, 2006). The selected examples for agrifood standards-setting and the model of contemporary food governance provide contexts within which the emergence of traceability systems in the agri-food sector can be placed. Conceptualizing ethical traceability and its potential for communicating about food in contemporary markets and societies requires consideration of the dynamics of the governance for this sector. The translation of traceability for food and feed into national standards, as well as European standards, also has to fall in line with international trade rules. The internationalization of traceability