Precautionary Bans or Sacrificial Lambs? Participative Risk Regulation and the Reform of the UK Food Safety Regime
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-3298.2004.00422.x |
| Author | Henry F. Rothstein |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
Public Administration Vol. 82 No. 4, 2004 (857–881)
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsi ngton Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
PRECAUTIONARY BANS OR SACRIFICIAL
LAMBS? PARTICIPATIVE RISK REGULATION
AND THE REFORM OF THE UK FOOD SAFETY
REGIME
HENRY F. ROTHSTEIN
This paper considers the impact of contemporary trends towards participative risk
regulation on policy processes and outcomes. Using the example of reform of the UK
food safety regime, the paper examines whether participative reforms are able to
deliver their promised benefits and if not, why not. Empirically, the paper examines
how in 2002 the UK’s Food Standards Agency used a stakeholder decision-making
process to manage the potential risks from BSE in sheep. The paper finds that the
potential benefits of the stakeholder process were mitigated by a number of institu-
tional factors, including: interpretative flexibility in representing consumer interests
and the concept of precaution; restricted openness and exclusion of key stakeholders;
and the supra-national regulatory context. The paper concludes that broadening
participation per se does not necessarily produce more democratic or robust policy
outcomes than closed processes, although it may have some limited value in improv-
ing public confidence in the regulatory regime.
INTRODUCTION
Broadening participation is undoubtedly the vogue prescription for many of
today’s regulatory ills. Widening participation in regulatory processes, so its
proponents argue, can improve the quality of regulation and better serve the
public interest by enhancing regulatory scrutiny, incorporating a wider set of
views and interests, and improving public awareness of the issues (see Dryzek
1990). Participative processes appear particularly attractive for risk regulation,
because the traditional machinery of government too often appears ill-suited to
cope with scientific uncertainties, conflicting demands for precautionary and
resilient policy stances and implementation deficits. Indeed, in the wake of a
number of risk regulation crises, both the UK government and the EU regard
building greater transparency, consultation and independence into regulatory
processes as important measures to restore public confidence in many failing
domains of governance (e.g. Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
(RCEP) 1998; Cabinet Office 2002; EC 2002).
While much hope is held out for broadening participation in risk regula-
tion, less attention has been paid to the institutional operationalization of
Henry F. Rothst ein is in the ESRC Cent re for Analysis of Ris k and Regulation (CARR) at the London
School of Economics.
858 HENRY F. ROTHSTEIN
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004
participative processes and the consequent impact on regulatory outcomes.
In practice, broadening participation can take many forms, with conse-
quently varying impacts on regulatory processes and outcomes. This paper,
therefore, considers the factors that shape whether such reforms are able to
deliver their promised benefits. In order to do so, the paper examines the
factors that shape just one type of participative reform – that of stakeholder
participation – and studies its consequences for policy processes and out-
comes within the UK food safety domain.
At least three types of rationale can be identified for broadening participation
in risk regulation (Fiorino 1990; NRC 1996; Perhac 1998; Owens 2000). Normative
rationales hold that risk regulation is not a value-free enterprise and that,
therefore, broadening participation within risk regulation is important for
moral, democratic and enlightenment reasons (Munton 2003). Greater open-
ness and participation, so it is argued, can: (1) help inform a wide range of
social and ethical judgements throughout the regulatory process; (2) confer
democratic legitimacy to regulatory processes and outcomes; and (3) strengthen
general public knowledge about risk governance (e.g. Shrader-Frechette
1991; Calman and Smith 2001).
Epistemic rationales, in contrast, hold that regulatory decision-makers are
often hampered by uncertainties and information asymmetries. Sources of
knowledge outside the traditional regulatory structures can, therefore, help
reduce the chance of policy error (Majone 1989; Funtowitz and Ravetz 1996).
Such compensating activities can take the form of consulting either professional
experts, interest groups or lay publics (Irwin 1995; Irwin and Wynne, 1996).
Finally, instrumental rationales hold that broadening participation is a use-
ful tool for ensuring the political viability of regulatory processes, particularly
in the context of declining levels of trust in political institutions (Bloomfield
et al. 2001; Frewer and Salter 2002). Greater openness and participation is
argued by many to increase public confidence in the legitimacy and integrity
of risk regulation by offering opportunities to secure stakeholder buy-in,
influence opinion-formers and directly shape public opinion and behaviour.
Participative reforms, however, may promise more than they can deliver.
First, the democratic and policy mandates of participative processes are often
inversely related. As participation is widened to meet democratic goals, so
such processes can become resource-intensive, unpredictable and hard to fit
with the institutional and legal constraints of policy-making. Thus, participa-
tive reforms that come closest to meeting democratic ideals – for example, by
directly involving the public in nationwide debates (GM Public Debate 2003) –
tend to be the furthest away from actual policy-making. In contrast, reforms
that have the closest links to policy-making, such as expanding the discipli-
nary composition of scientific advisory committees by including ethicists,
tend to be the most timid in rectifying democratic deficits (FSA 2002g). Mod-
els that sit between these two extremes entail compromise trade-offs, such as
stakeholder-style regulatory boards where public interest groups indirectly
represent public interests within relatively well-structured policy processes.
To continue reading
Request your trial