The paper aims to address measurement of effectiveness of food safety regulation in Europe. Effective governance becomes particularly relevant within the new-institutionalist approach, and what we are interested in is the impact of the institutional design on the effectiveness of food safety regulation. Particularly, the dimensions we intend to assess are: policy instrument, decision-making, and accountability.
Here, we consider effectiveness as the degree to which desired policy goals are achieved and literature suggests that its effectiveness can be identified with its two main policy goals: on one hand, the capacity to ensure consumer protection, and on the other hand, the capacity to protect producers’ interests, in order to ensure competitiveness within the market. Indeed, effectiveness can be understood as the level of success of institutional performance towards some objectives that motivated its establishment. Furthermore, the capacity of consumer protection can be translated with the capacity of the regulation to minimize the risk for the consumer.
Hence, effectiveness appears to play a central role within the complexity of food safety governance and understanding how to measure it is crucial to assess what does lead to effective governance and, on the other side, what does hinder effective governance.
This paper aims to review existing measures of effectiveness of food safety governance, and to give a theoretical perspective on how to operationalize effectiveness, eventually proposing an empirical measurement.
