Abstract
The exponential increase in food safety scares across the globe have resulted in growing regulatory initiatives, including rules and institutions from national governments, international organizations, and private actors. Due to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of public regulation, private governance in food safety, reinforced by economically powerful players like WalMart or Carrefour, has gradually become de facto mandatory and replaced public regulation. Private ordering has emerged as an informal way of governance with different designs, such as private standards, certification protocols, third-party auditing, and transnational contracting. Private ordering initiatives transcend national boundaries and filter all the way back through processors, traders, and down to the level of agricultural production in different states. Such private dominance in the traditionally public regulatory space has given rise to concerns as well as stimulating theoretical and practical inquiries. This paper therefore intends to explore the structure and processes of private food safety governance, its interactions with public regimes, and an optimal institutional design for publicprivate cooperation. Through various modes of public-private regulatory interactions, traditional command-and-control regulations are increasingly being supplemented or replaced by more flexible and informal, market-oriented mechanisms. It is crucial to understand how global food safety governance is configured and reconfigured through such complex and dynamic interactions. More specifically—What strengths and weaknesses are associated with the private approach to food safety regulation? Are public and private forms of governance in competition or do they complement each other? What problems and opportunities are associated with publicprivate regulatory collaboration? Whose values, interests or preferences tend to prevail when in such regulatory hybridization? What guiding principles, if any, should inform such publicprivate collaboration? This paper will provide an analytical account of how public/private boundaries in the governance of food safety have developed and shifted over time. By emphasizing the importance of crossboundary interactions instead of institutional boundary building, this paper intends to reconceptualize the traditional public/private dichotomy and delineate the architecture of hybrid global food safety governance. At a more general level, this paper highlights the need for fostering constructive public-private regulatory interactions as a way of effective governance. Public-private regulatory interactions are jurisgenerative and therefore able to serve as a vehicle for regulatory learning, norm diffusion, knowledge production, power distribution, and legal innovation.