发达国家如何保证食品安全（下）

欧盟：“从农田到餐桌”全程监控欧盟为统一并协调内部食品安全监管体制，30多年来先后制定了20多部食品安全方面的法规，形成比较完整的法律法规体系。从2000年颁布的《食品安全白皮书》到2002年生效的《食品基本法》，欧盟进一步在食品安全立法领域确定了一系列基本的原则和理念，在此基础上，逐步建立起一套较为完善的食品安全法律体系。     

透明原则在欧盟宪政中的发展和制度解读

透明原则随着信息社会的逐渐发展,越来越成为现代民主社会一个重要的基本特征,在越来越多的国家被确立为宪法性原则。这一原则在具体的制度设计上则体现为政府信息公开制度。欧洲从其20世纪50年代开始的从经济共同体逐步向政治一体化过渡的过程中,也在不断地探索与完善有关共同体或者是欧盟层面的信息公开制度。欧盟通过一系列立法逐渐将政府信息公开制度确立为其宪法性条约中的透明原则以及相关的一系列制度设计。欧盟的信息公开制度对我国刚刚起步的政府信息公开建设具有非常有益的参考和借鉴价值。     

中国食品安全地方标准法律制度研究

梳理我国食品安全地方标准的制度演进,探析食品安全地方标准的范围,可看出食品安全地方标准功能在于保障公众健康权、规范产业发展及有利于食品安全监管.我国食品安全地方标准内容的形成,应以食品安全风险评估结果、国家标准、国际标准和国外先进标准、其他省市的地方标准、专业文献和试验数据为基础;应健全与完善标准评审委员会制度,改进委员遴选机制,完善会议制度;并注重以多种方式征求食品生产经营者、消费者对地方标准的意见.     

欧盟性别平等就业法律之适用

两性平等待遇原则是欧盟法的一项基本法律原则。本文通过对欧盟劳动领域的性别平等法律之核心内容“同工同酬”原则等法律制度及欧盟法院的相关司法实践的阐述，分析了欧盟及成员国在形成与发展这一原则的演进线索与价值取向，并对该领域欧盟法律的新近发展做出介绍和说明。     

欧盟环境执法PPP原则及其例外考察——兼议对中国环境补贴制度设计的启示

欧盟在环境执法领域一直推崇PPP原则.事实上,通过考察欧盟环境执法不难发现其政策是以PPP原则为主,以环境补贴为辅的双管体例.这种制度设计在很长时间维持着欧盟环境与国际贸易制度的平衡,使欧盟得益匪浅.针对中国在贸易与环境可持续发展问题上遭遇的挑战,中国应借鉴欧盟体例,以环境补贴战略为重点,以政府主导为主,充分用足WTO绿灯补贴的相关规定;同时补贴制度应和其他相关制度相配套,真正减少对内对外贸易与环境平衡问题的困扰.     

浅谈我国《食品安全法》中惩罚性赔偿规定之完善

民以食为天,食以安为本。《食品安全法》的实施在保障食品安全问题上发挥了积极的作用。然而,一系列的恶性食品安全事件,依然不断触碰着国人敏感的神经。"十倍赔偿制度"作为《食品安全法》中的惩罚性赔偿规定,为何在现实中难以发挥其警示作用?本文从惩罚性赔偿制度的理论基础入手,分析了我国《食品安全法》中该制度的不足之处,提出应进一步在责任适用条件、赔偿金计算标准及求偿程序的建立上对其加以完善。     

美国食品安全监管的第三方审核机制研究

2010年美国通过了《FDA食品安全现代化法》,对进口食品安全监管首次引入第三方审核制度。这一规定背后反映的是美国在食品供应链全球化之后,传统的监管机制日益不敷现实之需而借鉴私人监管创新的结果。本文梳理了该法规定的第三方审核机制的适用范围和主要制度安排,同时考察了美国食品安全第三方审核机制的实践,深入分析了其存在的问题和面临的挑战。最后,作者探讨了美国这一机制对我国加强食品安全监管可能具有的启示。     

制度选择的逻辑——我国食品安全监管体制的演变

运用戴维斯和诺斯有关制度变迁的理论,结合我国的公共行政实践,构建了一个食品安全监管体制变迁的解释框架,并且利用这一解释框架提供的视角,对我国食品安全监管体制制度变迁过程中的逻辑进行分析.认为,在食品安全体制的演变过程中,制度变迁的收益与成本的考量是其背后的支配性因素,制度环境所提供的机遇窗口使制度变革得以可能,外部性与部门机会主义行为是制度变革的主要关注点,而路径依赖是制度变革的重要约束力量. 可以预期,我国食品安全监管体制的未来演变方向,将是制定更加完善的食品安全法律规范体系,更加清晰地界定监管部门之间的权责配置,从而降低监管的外部性;将监管权限恰当集中,减少监管部门的数量,从而降低协调的成本,尽量避免机会主义行为;建立起更加强势的部门间协调机构,甚至在国家层面设立专门的食品安全委员会;引入政府之外的力量,比如行业协会、消费者权益保护团体以及其他的一些民间团体,建立起所谓的"火警"机制,以补充由政府主导的食品安全监管体制.     

从欧盟的宪政构架看中国地方自治的制度变迁

《欧盟宪法》草案初步完成了欧盟超国家的权力构架的法定化,并对处理欧盟、成员国、地区和地方四级宪政构架的关系作出了原则性规定。欧盟立宪必然影响到欧盟内部地方自治制度的安排。本文旨在透过对于欧盟宪政中的地方自治及其制度性框架的描述和分析,探讨中国实行地方自治的原则和路径。     

改革农产品食品安全监管机制

<正>近年来,我国部分地区出现的苏丹红、瘦肉精、乳业危机等事件,使食品安全问题,尤其是农产品信任危机成为全社会广泛关注的热点话题。要落实"建立最严格的覆盖全过程的食品安全监管制度",保障"舌尖上的安全",必须解决现行农产品食品安全监管存在的政府条块管理、检测检验机构缺乏、追溯体系不健全等突出机制性问题,为此,建议从改革农产品食品安全监管机制入手,以落实监管责任。当前农产品食品安全监管存在的主要问     

Food Brexit and Chlorinated Chicken: A Microcosm of Wider Food Problems

This paper situates food safety concerns raised in the Brexit debate since the referendum and suggests that, although the issue of chlorinated chicken entered public discourse, it represents wider concerns about food safety standards. Food safety has had high resonance in the UK since the 1980s, but Brexit shows how it connects to wider concerns also raised about Brexit, such as impacts on healthcare, the effects of austerity on food poverty, the limitations of low waged employment, concerns about migration and labour markets, and regional economic disparities. Brexit’s impact on the UK food system is immense because food has been highly integrated into EU governance. While food standards can be portrayed as a single narrow issue, the paper suggests it provides a useful lens with which to examine, interrogate and comprehend these wider Brexit politics. The complex realities of food politics and wider food system dynamics undermine any simplistic political narrative of ‘taking back control’.     

Normative transformations in EU external relations: the phenomenon of ‘soft’ international agreements

Abstract

The European Union increasingly uses ‘soft’ international arrangements rather than formal international agreements in establishing relations with non-EU states. This contribution aims to raise the question of to what extent a move from hard to soft law in relations between the EU and its partners can be seen as allowing the Union to ‘step outside’ the legal framework (if that indeed is what is happening) and disregard the rules and principles that define the way in which EU external relations are to take shape. Possible consequences include the risk that these instruments are not subject to appropriate safeguards, that parliamentary influence (by the European Parliament as well as by national parliaments) is by-passed and that transparency is affected. There are various reasons for the EU not to use formal procedures, but a turn to informality does come at a price.     

Regulatory capitalism and its discontents: Bilateral interdependence and the adaptability of regulatory styles

The expansion of global trade has produced new challenges for the effective governance of product safety. We argue that many of these challenges arise at the bilateral level from the interaction of more or less adaptable national regulatory styles. When regulatory styles are unadaptable they produce gaps in risk management, slow and contested resolutions to crises, and limited regulatory cooperation. To examine these claims empirically, we study bilateral food safety regulation in four major exporter–importer dyads: China–Japan; Canada–United States (US), China–European Union (EU), and the US–Japan. The China–Japan dyad is the most adaptable, combining China's “export segmentation” regulatory style with Japan's strongly “risk‐averse, interventionist” style. The Canada–US dyad operates effectively, bringing together Canada's “global market–conforming” regulatory style with the US strategy of “sovereign regulator.” The China–EU dyad is less adaptable because the EU's “harmonization” regulatory style makes it difficult for the EU to adapt to the weaknesses of the Chinese food safety system. Finally, the US's sovereign regulator style clashes with Japan's interventionist style, making them the least adaptable of the four dyads. The paper concludes with a discussion of the broader relevance of our findings for the development of regulatory capitalism.     

The parable of the poisoned pork: Network governance and the 2008 Irish pork dioxin contamination

The 2008 contamination of Irish pork with dioxins was one of the most significant recent food safety incidents in the European Union (EU). While the contamination posed no real risk to public health, it tested the efficacy of EU food safety regulation and governance which has been considerably overhauled in the past decade. The exchange of risk information through networks of regulators is an important element of the EU food safety risk management framework. Networks are a much‐lauded form of new governance, though they are not without their problems. In this paper, we address the question of why governance networks can fail. We examine this issues using the case study of the 2008 Irish dioxin contamination and explore the reason for the failure to make more substantial use of networks in the governance of that incident. We hypothesize that the reason for such failure may be found in three inherent tensions which exist in the design and management of networks, namely flexibility/stability, inclusiveness/efficiency, and internal/external legitimacy. The paper concludes that by ensuring the external legitimacy of the EU's Rapid Alert System for Feed and Food (RASFF) through increased transparency of communications, the design of RASFF has stifled its internal legitimacy with regard to certain types of important information exchanges.     

Redistribution in a political union: The case of the EU

A key function of centralized budgets in federal and political unions is to act as an equalizing mechanism to support economic and social cohesion. This is also the case with the European Union's (EU) budget, which operates as a redistributive mechanism that counteracts the cross-national and cross-regional inequalities created by the single market. Despite the limits on cross-national redistribution imposed by a centrifugal system of representation, the net fiscal position of member states – what they pay to the EU budget minus what they receive from it – is very diverse and has changed quite remarkably over the last decades. In this paper, we investigate how and why the net fiscal position of each member state toward the rest of the EU changes over time. We develop a novel panel dataset (1979–2014) to study how key national and EU-level political and economic variables affect the EU redistributive dynamics. We find that redistribution via the EU budget primarily targets developments in inequality within EU member states, and that an increase in domestic unemployment may also improve the country's fiscal balance. Moreover, we find that voting power in the Council is unrelated to a more positive fiscal balance. However, we find that governments with a centre-right profile are in general more successful in improving their redistributive position vis-à-vis the other member states. This may create a problem of budgetary ‘rent extraction’.     

The contested nature of political leadership in the European Union: conceptual and methodological cross-fertilisation

Abstract

European leaders have struggled to find common responses to the polycrisis the EU is facing. This crisis of leadership makes it urgent that scholars provide a better understanding of the role and impact of leadership in EU politics and policy making. This article prepares the ground for a collection of contributions that addresses this need by strengthening old and building new bridges between the academic domains of European studies and leadership studies. It opens with a discussion of the contested concept of leadership in the context of the European polity and politics, challenging the conventional view that leadership is necessarily a matter of hierarchy. Moreover, it argues that rather than leaderless, the EU is an intensely ‘leaderful’ polity. Subsequently, this introduction identifies four key debates in contemporary EU leadership research and discusses the value and insights the contributions in this special issue bring to these debates.     

Citizen support for European Union membership: the role of socialisation experiences

The article explores whether European Union membership has a socialisation effect on citizens’ attitudes towards their country’s membership of the EU. Using a sample of 15 Western European countries, it is shown that this is the case. First, evidence is provided of a positive lifelong socialisation effect: citizen support for their country’s membership of the EU increases with years spent living in an EU member state. Second, it is shown that those who joined the EU during their formative years are less supportive of the EU, whilst those who spent their formative years in a non-democracy are more positive about EU membership. The size of these effects is very small in comparison to that found for the lifelong socialisation effect, suggesting that the lifelong socialisation process of continued EU membership is much more important for EU attitudes. This study offers new insights into the formation of EU attitudes.     

Active citizenship through mobility? Students’ perceptions of identity,rights and participation in the EU

Globalisation has begun to transform the processes through which citizens are differentiated and non-citizens are excluded. This article provides an in-depth qualitative interrogation of these processes of differentiation and exclusion, and argues that the transformation in these processes compels us to reconsider the conceptual dichotomy of passive/active citizens along the stayers/mobiles distinction. This transformation is most apparent in Europe, with the introduction of European Union (EU) citizenship. The article builds on Bourdieu’s cultural capital in the cosmopolitan context, existing qualitative studies on citizens’ sense of EU identity and citizenship, and illustrative focus group evidence of visiting EU and home students’ perceptions of EU citizenship across three dimensions – identity, rights and participation. The evidence indicates that we can distinguish between four categories of citizens in the EU: passive EU citizens, including two groups of stayers; the potential EU (i) and member state-oriented (ii) citizens, and active EU citizens, including EU-15 (iii) and Central and Eastern European (iv) mobile citizens. These categories reveal that important distinctions are emerging between the perceptions and behaviour of stayers and mobiles as passive/active citizens.     

Mapping EU agencies as political entrepreneurs

The European Union relies on decentralised agencies to implement important transnational regulations, such as certifying the safety of medicines. However, the authority of these agencies does not have ‘hard’ legal status and crucially depends on disseminating ideas and information effectively: what can be termed ‘political entrepreneurship’. This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the political entrepreneurship of EU agencies by constructing a conceptual typology of entrepreneurial strategies. Drawing conceptually on transnational public administration, a new database is constructed of the ‘entrepreneurship’ of 33 EU agencies in 2014 based on their media communication activities, face‐to‐face networking in workshops and collaborations, and knowledge dissemination and ‘learning’ exercises. This is mapped against the political salience of agencies in the European Parliament and media. The mapping exercise shows four types of entrepreneurial strategies covering the population of EU agencies: technical functional, insulating, network‐seeking and politicised. The typology is validated through semi‐structured interviews in 11 EU agencies, showing the core characteristics of each type of strategy. The article concludes by arguing that this typology provides an important addition to existing categories of EU agencies based on autonomy and accountability, and advocates a future research strategy examining the interaction between agencies’ entrepreneurial strategies and the expectations and reactions of stakeholder audiences.     

Sharing the burden in a free riders’ land: The EU migration and asylum policy in the views of public opinion and politicians

New divisions have emerged within the European Union over the handling of the recent migration crisis. While both frontline and favoured destination countries are called upon to deal with the number of migrants looking for international protection and better living conditions, no consensus has been reached yet on the quota-based mechanisms for the relocation of refugees and financial help to exposed countries proposed by the EU. Such mechanisms pose a trade-off for member states: the EU's response to the crisis offers help to countries under pressure, but it inevitably requires burden-sharing among all EU members and a limitation of their national sovereignty. Within this scenario, the article compares how public opinion and political elites in ten different EU countries view a common EU migration policy grounded on solidarity and burden-sharing. By tracing both within- and cross-national patterns of convergence (and divergence), the article shows that contextual factors influence policy preferences, with support for solidarity measures being stronger in countries with higher shares of illegal migrants and asylum seekers. While individuals’ predispositions, identity and ideological orientations account for both masses’ and elites’ attitudes towards burden-sharing measures, subjective evaluations and beliefs concerning the severity of the crisis provide additional and alternative explanations when looking at the public's preferences. In particular, it is found that concern about the flow of migrants to Europe consolidates the impact of contextual factors, whereas the overestimation of the immigrant population fosters hostility against solidarity measures, with both effects more pronounced as the country's exposure to the crisis increases. In the light of these results, the main implication of this study is that EU institutions have to primarily address entrenched beliefs and misperceptions about immigrants to enhance public support for a joint approach to migration.