Smart enforcement in the EU (original) (raw)
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What type of enforcement is the most effective to punish violations of food law or to prevent them from occurring in the first place? This article examines the question of which mix of private and public enforcement exists in European Union (EU) food law and whether this mix corresponds to the recommendations of existing social science research. Based on this research, we contend that EU-determined enforcement mechanisms differ in effectiveness across Member States. New technologies have the potential to stimulate a novel mix of public and private enforcement tools at the EU and national levels.
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For effective enforcement of its law the EU is to a large extent dependent on the enforcement efforts of the member states. The member states are responsible for the correct and timely application of EU treaties and secondary EU legislation. This dependence is an important reason for the European legislator and European courts to increasingly guide national enforcement.
From “smart regulation” to “regulatory arrangements
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When regulators are faced with practical challenges, policy instrument choice theories can help them find the best solution. However, not all such theories are equally helpful. This paper aims to offer regulators a better alternative to the current policy instrument choice theories. We will specifically address the shortcomings of “smart regulation theory” and present an alternative that keeps the best of that theory while remediating its weak points. Some authors (Böcher and Töller 2003; Baldwin and Black 2008) say that smart regulation theory does not address institutional issues, compliance type-specific response, performance-sensitivity and adaptability of regulatory regime. We have resolved these problems by merging the smart regulation theory with the policy arrangement approach and the policy learning concept. We call the resulting approach “regulatory arrangement approach” (RAA). The central idea of the RAA is to constrain the almost infinite “smart” regulatory options by: the national policy style; adverse effects of policy arrangements of adjoining policies; the structure of the policy arrangement of the investigated policy and competence dependencies of other institutions. The reduction can be so drastic that the potential governance capacity falls below the smart regulation threshold. In other words, no smart regulatory arrangement can be developed in that institutional context unless policy learning occurs. In addition, a “smart” regulatory arrangement is no guarantee that the policy will succeed. For this reason, the performance of the regulatory arrangement is measured and evaluated. Performance below a certain threshold indicates that the regulatory arrangement needs to be adapted, which then results in policy learning. We illustrate the usefulness of this new approach with a secondary analysis of the Flemish sustainable forest management policy.
International Law Research, 2016
In modern day ‘multilevel’ regulation, legal enforcement of transnational standards usually takes place at another level than where the norm was created in the first place. The quest for smart regulation begs the question which level is most appropriate to proper legal enactment and enforcement. Not only as a matter of location (e.g. inter- or supranational, or domestic), but also concerning the level of strength (i.e. intensity of prescription and/or coercion). How can ‘regulatory overstretch’ be avoided – given smart regulatory principles of subsidiarity and responsiveness? A general description is provided of regulatory enforcement, from a regulatory and an enforcement perspective, followed by a discussion of appropriateness of enforcement from the dimensions of location-level and of strength-level. Finally, a simple model is presented for a ‘remediableness analysis’ of appropriate matching of strength and location level scenarios of enforcement – as guidance for enactment and en...
Risk Regulation, EU Law and Emerging Technologies: Smother or Smooth?
NanoEthics, 2008
Risk analysis as a regulatory driver has now become firmly entrenched in public health and environmental protection. Risk analysis at any level essentially has to accommodate two gut feelings of the constituency: whether society should be riskprone or risk averse, and whether government and its institutions can be trusted to make the necessary decisions with a high or a low degree of discretion. The precautionary principle (or rejection thereof) arguably is the ultimate reflection of the promotion of risk to a societal value. There is no doubt that especially amongst the representatives of the Member States (as opposed to the officials at the European Commission), public (pre)caution with respect to the long-term environmental and public health implications of gene technology influenced the reluctance to allow marketing of GM foods and feeds until a strict regulatory regime had been rolled out. Industry would argue that the delay in regulation, as well as the eventual regime was of such a nature as to stifle the technology. This contribution reviews a number of features of standard EU risk analysis decisions, so as to assess its current propensity towards smothering rather than smoothing the introduction of new technology. The current development of a regulatory framework for nanotechnology serves as a case study.
Experiments in Food Safety Policy Integration in the European Union*
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2006
Policy issues are increasingly cross-cutting. Policy integration has therefore become a fashionable concept among policy-makers at domestic and international levels. Theoretically, the article facilitates a deeper understanding of the concept of policy integration. Empirically, this article analyses food safety policy integration in the European Union (EU). Three different historical phases are identified here. The central argument is that the way cross-cutting policy issues are integrated within policy sectors affects the opportunities for effective integration of these issues across different policy sectors.