Challenges to Legitimacy in Food Safety Governance? The Case of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)

Abstract

The ‘old’ forms of governance have been criticized for being neither sufficiently democratic nor effective. The popularity of ‘new’ modes of governance includes the embracing of values — integral to democratic processes — such as legitimacy, public accountability and trust. By relating parts of this ‘old‐vs.‐new’ distinction to March and Olsen’s dichotomy of aggregative vs. integrative political processes, the aim of this paper is to find patterns for how such processes are combined in European food safety governance. The paper focuses on the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). What forms of participation can be found in ‘new’ food safety governance? How are these forms of participation related to the aims of increasing the legitimacy? The article discusses challenges involved in EFSA’s mixing of integrative goals and the organization’s view of food safety politics, in which aggregative policy processes are conceived as a rough ‘natural state’ which should be tamed.

Key Words:

• European harmonization
• food safety
• food governance
• deliberative democracy
• output legitimacy
• input legitimacy

Acknowledgement

This article is based on work funded by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial planning, and the Swedish Research Council.

Notes

1. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/efsa_locale-1178620753812_home.htm (accessed 31 October 2007).

2. By EFSA’s members of EFSA and its Consultative Platform we refer to the Management Board, Scientific Committee and Panels, Advisory Forum as well as EFSA’s Stakeholder Consultative Platform.

3. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/stakeholder_stakeholder.html (accessed 17 January 2008).

4. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/AboutEfsa/HowWeWork/KeyValues/efsa_locale-1178620753812_Transparency.htm (accessed 3 April 2008).

5. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/EFSA/AboutEfsa/efsa_locale-1178620753812_WhoWeAre.htm (accessed 3 April 2008).