In the wake of numerous food scandals in the 1990s, the so-called BSE-crisis constituting merely the most prominent of a number of cases, a variety of quite radical reforms in the EU and the EU member states occurred. The previous regulative structures designed to maintain high standards of food safety were changed significantly in order to be able to provide consumers with better protection from food-born risks. The perception of food safety as a part of risk regulation raises the question how to integrate scientific expertise in regulative politics.
Nearly all member states now hold independent and specialised agencies attending to matters of food regulation; Evidence for this is provided by a partial study conducted on behalf of the Federal Institute for Risk Regulation (Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung, BfR) covering the status-quo in all EU member states. On the EU-level itself, too, in 2001/02 the European Food Safety Agency – albeit provided merely with an advisory mandate – devoted to the further development of this important field of regulative politics. Subsequently, a regulative network is emerging among the EFSA and the national agencies for food safety, but also horizontally among the national agencies. Regulative competencies in this network are spread over different levels and interconnected, holding the emergence of shared academic standards of evaluation as a prime objective.
The research project seeks to record and subsequently explain the development in this policy field in front of the background of the growing literature covering the significance of regulative politics in, as well as “agencification” of the EU (“the EU as regulatory state”). Empirically, both the vertical and the horizontal structure of this interconnection are at the center of analysis. Theoretical accounts of Europeanisation provide a further empirical point of reference. Hence, it becomes possible to ask, in how far effects of Europeanisation can be observed with regard to norm diffusion, institutional isomorphism, the inclusion of stakeholders etc.
First master theses have emerged in this field of study, covering, for instance, the role of the EFSA and the significance of academic expertise (Alexander Kobusch, 2008), the development and comparison of national agencies in Hungary and Germany (Jennifer Träsch, 2010), as well as the charged relation between development and path dependency in food regulation (Jan Ullrich, 2012). In addition, several PhD candidates work in this field of study.