Public-Private Regime Interactions in Global Food Safety Governance

The exponential increase in food safety incidents across the globe in the past decades have resulted in mushrooming regulatory initiatives, including new standards and requirements from national governments, international organizations, and private actors. The regulatory lacuna in public regulatory space has left room for the proliferating private ordering initiatives at different levels with different designs, which have given rise not only to concerns but also many interesting theoretical and practical questions, for their important public health, international trade, and development implications. As regulatory regimes in global administrative space do not operate in isolation, it is crucial to understand how global food safety governance is configured and reconfigured through complex regime interactions. This paper therefore endeavors to explore the structure and processes of private food safety governance and their interactions with the traditional public governance regimes so as to shed light on such inquiries.