POWER LEARNING OR PATH DEPENDENCY? INVESTIGATING THE ROOTS OF THE EUROPEAN FOOD SAFETY AUTHORITY
| Author | CARSTEN DAUGBJERG,CHRISTILLA ROEDERER‐RYNNING |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.2010.01832.x |
| Published date | 01 June 2010 |
| Date | 01 June 2010 |
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9299.2010.01832.x
POWER LEARNING OR PATH DEPENDENCY?
INVESTIGATING THE ROOTS OF THE EUROPEAN
FOOD SAFETY AUTHORITY
CHRISTILLA ROEDERER-RYNNING AND CARSTEN DAUGBJERG
A key motive for establishing the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) was restoring public
confidence in the wake of multiplying food scares and the BSE crisis. Scholars, however, have paid
little attention to the actual political and institutional logics that shaped this new organization. This
article explores the dynamics underpinning the making of EFSA. We examine the way in which
learning and power shaped its organizational architecture. It is demonstratedthat the lessons drawn
from the past and other models converged on the need to delegate authority to an external agency,
but diverged on its mandate, concretely whether or not EFSA should assume risk management
responsibilities. In this situation of competitive learning, power and procedural politics conditioned
the mandate granted to EFSA. The European Commission, the European Parliament and the
European Council shared a common interest in preventing the delegation of regulatory powers to
an independent EU agency in food safety policy.
INTRODUCTION
This study examines the creation of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). The cen-
tral problem under scrutiny is one of institutional choice and concerns the role that policy
learning played in establishing EFSA’s organizational design. Here, design is understood
to be ‘the creation of an actionable form to promote valued outcomes in a particular con-
text’ (Bobrow and Dryzek 1987, p. 201, quoted in Goodin 1996, p. 31). While to date EFSA
has not received much scholarly attention, current understandings of how EFSA came to
life tend to stress the role of learning. Accordingly, the BSE scandal set the scene for the
process leading to the creation of EFSA. This political climate surrounding the establish-
ment of EFSA was especially propitious for learning and the public debate was driven
by the need to prevent similar food safety scandals from happening again. EFSA thus
reflected the shadow of the past, building as it did upon the lessons drawn from BSE. This
interpretation challenges a longstanding tradition, recently reinvigorated by institutional-
ist accounts, which insists that institutional design is a strategic act where actors’ decisions
are motivated by the long-term consequences of organizational decisions on their proce-
dural interests – the shadow of the future. In this paper, we examine the role that learning
and power played in shaping EFSA in light of empirical evidence on the political process
leading to its establishment. We argue that, while learning goes some way towards explain-
ing why EU policy-makers opted for the creation of an independent agency, it fails to
explain why a specific model of delegation was chosen over another. We hypothesize that
procedural interests played an important role in finalizing the mandate of the new agency.
The analysis proceeds as follows. We first review the competing arguments on lesson
drawing and procedural politics. We then briefly discuss methodological issues related
to evaluating lesson drawing arguments. The section that follows introduces a typology
of food safety control based on: (1) the extent to which control is embedded in the normal
Christilla Roederer-Rynning is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Management,
University of Southern Denmark, Odense. Carsten Daugbjerg is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Aarhus
University.
Public Administration Vol. 88, No. 2, 2010 (315–330)
©2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.
316 CHRISTILLA ROEDERER-RYNNING AND CARSTEN DAUGBJERG
governmental processes or delegated; and (2) the relation be tween risk assessment and
risk management. This provides a conceptual grid from which we can evaluate how
much change took place with the establishment of EFSA. The section that follows dives
into the policy process leading to the creation of EFSA in order to identify instances of
cognitive change, as stipulated by lesson drawing arguments. The incomplete success of
lesson drawing arguments leads us to probe the usefulness of power arguments in the
final section.
LESSON DRAWING, POWER, AND PROCEDURAL POLITICS
Learning arguments have been flourishing in European and American research on policy
change. A recent survey of the literature (Meseguer 2005, p. 71) identified no fewer than
six different variants of the learning argument. Uniting these approaches is the claim that,
as Heclo nicely puts it in a now classic statement, ‘governments not only ‘‘power’’ . . .,
they also puzzle’ (Heclo 1974, p. 305). This claim clearly challenges the view, dominant
today as in the 1970s, associating politics with conflicts of interest and values and the
exercise of power.
In this article, we refer more specifically to the seminal articles by Rose (1991) and
Dolowitz and Marsh (1996, 2000). Dolowitz and Marsh (2000, p. 5) define policy transfer
as a process by which ‘knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institu-
tions and ideas in one political system (past or present) is used in the development of
policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system’.
Lesson drawing is one of three mechanisms by which policy experiences are transferred.
The other two mechanisms are: a coercive process, where actors’ decisions are imposed
from outside; and a mix of coercion and voluntary processes (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996,
pp. 346–7, 2000, pp. 13–14). Lesson drawing is a voluntary process, where actors’ decisions
presuppose some degree of rationality but this can be constrained by actors’ ‘perceptions
of a decision-making situation’. Indeed, actors may misperceive the situation because of
incomplete or mistaken information (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, p. 14).
For Rose (1991), lesson drawing plays a growing role in shaping contemporary policy-
makers’ decisions. Emulation is a key mechanism in lesson drawing. It is defined as the
process by which policy-makers select from policy experiments elsewhere or from the
past to improve the efficiency and performance of existing programmes and policies.
These policy experiments are scanned and screened in order to scrutinize the gains and
losses that can arise from adopting them, before being incorporated (or rejected) either
partly or wholly at home. Although the conditions under which lesson drawing occurs
are relatively vague, the proponents of this approach suggest that lesson drawing requires
two broad conditions: (1) dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs; and (2) the belief,
supported by more or less detailed evidence, that the programme that is to be emulated
will improve the given state of affairs (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, p. 14).
We do not see the approaches pursued by Rose on the one hand, and Dolowitz and
Marsh on the other, as mutually exclusive. Rather, Dolowitz and Marsh provide an
overarching framework within which lesson drawing is but one mechanism by which
policy-relevant knowledge travels across time and space. Both approaches involve an
action-oriented process in which policy-makers draw more or less informed conclusions
on policies, programme or administrative arrangements in operation elsewhere or from
the past, and on whether these policies, programmes or administrative arrangements can
be transferred to another setting.
Public Administration Vol. 88, No. 2, 2010 (315–330)
©2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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