Global risk governance: what role for public administrations: the paradigm of the EU food safety control and alert systems
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852317708250 |
| Author | Andrea Iurato |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
Global risk governance: what
role for public administrations:
the paradigm of the EU food
safety control and alert systems
Andrea Iurato
Universita
`di Pavia, Italy
Abstract
This study explores crucial issues arising from the increasing establishment of supra-
national risk-governance systems that pursue a compromise between the need for
effective governance and the necessity to avoid obstacles regarding trade. In these
contexts, national public administrations become a peripheral module in a multilevel
system where they see their organization altered and the legitimacy of their actions
questioned. The analysis uses as a paradigm the systems on food safety controls
and rapid alert in the EU and tries to answer the following questions: How do we
give public administrations an effective role in the global scene? Are national adminis-
trations destined to become mere executors of supranational-set rules? Outcomes
show that legal systems whose multilevel integration reached a high level suggest
positive implications deriving from a new model of global governance not involving a
reduction in state sovereignty, but leading it to a new role, guaranteeing the accom-
plishment of supranational-set goals and safeguarding the autonomy of national public
administrations.
Points for practitioners
Practitioners, especially those who hold managerial positions, may often find themselves
disoriented when acting in a multilevel context because of the shrinking of their auton-
omy as well as their submission to external rules and controls. Starting from the analysis
of the elected paradigm, practitioners could find that in a well-functioning multilevel
regulatory system, national public administrations are able to use their remaining range
of discretion, even if minimal, in order to realize innovative organizational models,
through which they may avoid direct intervention from upper levels and propose them-
selves as a model to be borrowed and applied in the whole system.
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
2019, Vol. 85(2) 304–318
!The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852317708250
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Corresponding author:
Andrea Iurato, Universita
`di Pavia, Corso Strada Nuova, 65, Pavia, PV 27100, Italy.
Email: andrea.iurato@unipv.it
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