Elsevier

Sociologie du Travail

Volume 51, Supplement 2, November 2009, Pages e104-e116
Sociologie du Travail

Legitimation by standards: Transnational experts, the European Commission and regulation of novel foods

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soctra.2009.06.022Get rights and content

Abstract

How do voluntary standards get put to use in European Union policy? A study of how a particular private-sector voluntary standard was imported and developed for use in EU policy offers grounds for interpreting the power relations among carriers of the standard, a transnational group of scientific experts and the European Commission. Far from involving a mere linear transfer, the process of importing a new standard for ensuring the health safety of “novel foods” gave rise to exchanges, competition and disagreement that worked to define the boundaries of the public policy sector and the territory of each group of actors within it. The ground gained by scientific experts thanks to a new standard granting them an increased role in regulating new foods was counterbalanced by the authority of the European Commission, since it has control over interpreting EU law.

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

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