Multilevel Food Safety Governance and Its Discontents

Abstract

What's the Beef? The Contested Governance of European Food Safety. Edited by Christopher Ansell, David Vogel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 400 pp., $67.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-262-01225-1), $27.00 paper (ISBN: 0-262-51192-4). What's the Beef , by Christopher Ansell and David Vogel, is a book about policy analysis. It explores the contested governance that has resulted from the multilevel and multiactor regulation of food safety within the European Union. Ansell and Vogel see contested governance as a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements within the European Union. The contributions to this edited volume focus on explaining how contested governance arises and on assessing whether recent reforms of European food safety governance will lessen the level of contestation. The main thesis of What's the Beef is twofold. First, Ansell and Vogel maintain that European food safety governance has become especially contested as a result of several food safety crises (most notably Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy , or Mad Cow Disease), European integration, and international trade liberalization. Their main qualms with multilevel governance stem from its comparatively weak institutionalization and the multiple conflicts that such governance engenders. These weaknesses arise because (1) European or international regulation interferes with the different cultural preferences and institutional logics of European states; (2) there exists a lack of trust in postnational institutions; (3) organized interests have numerous access points into policymaking as a direct result of multilevel governance; and (4) the institutions of multilevel governance have precarious legitimacy. Other contributors emphasize what can be considered subsidiary explanations—such as conflicts resulting from changes in agricultural production, disagreements over the appropriate basis for regulatory decision making in the face of substantial risks, and differences in the perceptions of the risks involved. Second, Ansell and Vogel also argue that, when contested governance arises, it creates a window of opportunity for reform efforts that are designed to restore trust and legitimacy. The main trends they identify in this regard are (1) the removal of health protection from the control of …