Negotiating International Food Standards: The World Trade Organization's Impact on the Codex Alimentarius Commission

The article presents an empirical account of how the role, position, and perception of the intergovernmental food standardization body, Codex Alimentarius Commission, has changed after being referred to by the World Trade Organization (WTO) as the "central reference point for the elaboration of international food standards." Both the Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Agreement and the Technical Barriers to Trade Agreement include provisions that encourage WTO members to base their national regulations on international standards. The article focuses on key issues in the Codex that may have a significant impact on international food trade. The overall conclusion is that the WTO has contributed to constraining the activity and shaping the expectations of Codex members. Governments participating in Codex activities have changed their behavior after 1995 due to increased uncertainty with respect to how decisions in Codex may be binding for them under the WTO Agreements.     

META‐GOVERNANCE: VALUES,NORMS AND PRINCIPLES,AND THE MAKING OF HARD CHOICES

Meta‐governance – or governance of governance – is a concept that raises questions regarding how values, norms and principles underpin governance systems and governing approaches. Values, norms and principles pertain both to substantive governance issues, for instance, related to sustainable resource use, and to governance system issues in themselves, for instance, regarding their institutional design. This article deals primarily with the latter. Thus the interactive perspective serves as basis for developing a coherent set of meta‐governance principles. We argue that an explicit, deliberated and decided upon set of meta‐governance principles as an integral part of governance can help in making hard substantive governance choices easier. Interactive learning plays a key role in governance processes when public and private governing actors have to make such hard choices. In the article, examples from natural resource governance will serve as illustrations for the more conceptual argumentation and reasoning.     

Lost in the System or Lost in Translation? The Exchanges between Hart and Ross*

According to the received opinion there is a theoretical incompatibility between Herbert Hart's The Concept of Law and Alf Ross's On Law and Justice, and, according to the received opinion, it stems above all from Hart's emphasis on the internal point of view. The present paper argues that this reading is mistaken. The Concept of Law does not go beyond On Law and Justice in so far as both present arguments to the effect that law is based on a shared understanding between participants in a project perceived by every participant to be a project in common. The paper demonstrates that there are substantive parallels between Hart's combination of “acceptance” or “acknowledgement” and a “critical reflective attitude” and Ross's combination of “motivation” or “feeling” and a “coherent whole of meaning and motivation.” The main conclusion is that the views of norms and normativity put forward in The Concept of Law and On Law and Justice are very close in essential respects, and, more specifically, that the two works are at root identical in their representation of the basis of normativity in reality.     

Bringing culture back in: pluralism and societal corporatism as contexts of strategic adaptation

Abstract. The limited literature on offshore industrial relations in Britain and Norway has focused on the deviant nature of such arrangements compared to national traditions. The 'newness' of the sector and the special nature of the oil industry have been used to explain the deviance. This study, instead, controls for such factors and shows how contrasting patterns of adaptation can be related to system properties. Industrial relations in the two countries can be viewed as ideal-type approximations of pluralism and societal corporatism. Within the tradition contrasting pluralism and neocorporatism, the dominant perspective has deliberately excluded cultural aspects, stressing instead structural form. The article argues for the reintroduction of culture and shows how British and Norwegian offshore developments reflect fundamentally different orientations towards industrial relations. Culture is not, however, conceptualized as ideosyncratic characteristics of the two countries. It stems instead from different histories of labour-capital relations.     

Fused Modality. An Integral Part of Lawyers’ Form of Life*

Abstract. In this reply to Dahlman (2004 ), the focus is on aspects that I take to be of general interest. The point to be emphasised is the absence of a critically reflexive mode of questioning on the part of Dahlman and, in general, on the part of the position he represents, namely, an empiricist and logical paradigm of atemporal cognition and control. It is argued that lawyers’ thinking de lege lata—with its distinctive connection to normativity and morals, through the unity of the temporal and institutional dimensions in fused modality—can never be understood within such a framework.