Giulia Bazzan - Effective Governance Designs of Food Safety Regulation in the EU: Do Rules Make the Difference?

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This book is the result of a challenging and inspiring three-year research conducted at the Network for the Advancement of Social and Political Studies at the University of Milan and enriched by a research stay at the Centre of European Governance at the University of Exeter. It draws from my doctoral dissertation and reflects my interest in regulation and governance effectiveness in the domains of food safety and in set-theoretic and comparative methods. The research vision of this book is mainly driven by my curiosity about policy and regulatory processes, governance, policy capacity, and institutional theories.

This book is the result of many encounters and exchanges with scholars and experts who supported me in confronting my research questions. I am grateful to those who have read and discussed my work in the past years, and inspired and stimulated my intellectual journey. I would like to especially thank Alessia Damonte for her guidance and training. I am also grateful for the expert advice and intellectual inspiration of Claudio Radaelli, Eva Thomann, Adrian Dua, and Maria Stella Righettini. My warm thanks also go to Carsten Daugbjerg and Jeroen Candel, who supported me into the final steps of my work.

This chapter introduces the question of effective governance designs of food safety regulation. It presents reasons why the new scholarly attention to food regulation constitutes an opportunity to investigate a number of broader issues that have concerned regulatory governance scholars, including effectiveness of regulation, the interplay between monitoring and enforcement (and their consequences), quality of regulatory designs , and the effects of policy capacity on regulatory outcomes. In doing so, it introduces the main argument of the book, which is the complementarity of policy capacity theories with regulatory governance theories in explaining successes and failures. By using food safety regulation as an illustrative case, it identifies gaps in the literature, and it frames the present contribution in the landscape of comparative public policy.