Who Governs Europe? Public Versus Private Regulation of Sustainability of Fish Feeds

Abstract

Primary tensions within EU government are consistently shown as between public actors who compete with one another to set policy — the European Commission/Member States/European Parliament. Whilst important, such a wholehearted focus on these conflicts is obscuring other tensions increasingly defining its politics, namely between public vs. private regulation. These merit greater attention in European integration analysis. Private regulation is not totally disconnected from its public counterpart: through standardization, private actors can evoke and institutionalize EU norms and principles, like sustainability, thus governing in its name; the contents of private self-regulation can potentially undermine the effects of EU public policies. To better capture the causes of these emerging public–private interdependencies and their consequences for EU government, a key contribution of this article is to argue for the necessity to both localize and particularize the inquiry on private regulation. This we demonstrate through presenting the revealing case of fishfeeds and their sustainability.