Legitimation by standards: Transnational experts, the European Commission and regulation of novel foods☆
Section snippets
The career of a standard, or the emerging regulation of functional foods
Governmental authorities often regulate by means of rules elaborated by others. This is the case for international standards developed by private-sector international organizations, business consortiums and networks of experts.
Developing a standard and sector-specific tools
Over its nearly twenty-year-long trajectory, PLM evolved from the status of an experimental protocol to the status of voluntary standard. It has been adopted by all governmental or paragovernmental organizations implicated in formulating regulations on novel foods. Does the career of this standard show that the European Commission is unable to elaborate its own instruments and is dependent on standards developed outside of the spaces it controls?
To answer this question, we must be able to
The standard and definition of policy territories
Justifying the development of a coherent set of rules and standards for regulating a certain type of object or a given problem amounts to laying down boundaries between public policy sectors. No overall vision of a problem can be constructed unless it is combined with a vision of action modes and the tools to be used.
The question of who carries the standard thus touches on public policy “geography” and relations between policy sectors and territories. As we shall now see, the counter-tactics of
Conclusion
This study of the career of the PLM standard shows that factors of standard continuity and discontinuity coexist. The fact that a private-sector practice, experimental and local, became an international guideline is explained by the fact that an “invisible college” had coordinated a growing number of intergovernmental or supranational organizations and regulatory agencies and that these agencies recognized the work done by the International Life Science Institute.
Each organization's criteria
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Translation by Amy Jacobs