Precautionary bans or sacrificial lambs? Participative regulation and the reform of the UK food safety regime

This paper considers the impact of contemporary trends towards participative risk regulation on policy processes and outcomes. Using the example of reform of the UK food safety regime, the paper examines whether participative reforms are able to deliver their promised benefits and if not, why not. Empirically, the paper examines how in 2002 the UK's Food Standards Agency used a stakeholder decision-making process to manage the potential risks from BSE in sheep. The paper finds that the potential benefits of the stakeholder process were mitigated by a number of institutional factors, including: interpretative flexibility in representing consumer interests and the concept of precaution; restricted openness and exclusion of key stakeholders; and the supra-national regulatory context. The paper concludes that broadening participation per se does not necessarily produce more democratic or robust policy outcomes than closed processes, although it may have some limited value in improving public confidence in the regulatory regime.