From Punishment to Prevention: the Introduction of Co-regulation in the Enforcement of Food Safety Regulation.

Abstract: In the last decade, the concept of co-regulation has been developed and increasingly promoted as an important instrument of regulation. In enforcement of food safety rules, there is a very broad range of enforcement approaches that may be defined as modes of co-regulation. In these, regulation is designed and set by public authorities and enforced by coordinated actions provided by public authorities and regulated by firms. This paper contributes to the analysis of modes of co-regulation within the enforcement regimes of food safety regulations. We present a framework for evaluating the shift toward co-regulation and from a punishment to a prevention approach from an enforcement agency’s perspective. We show that the linear descending alignment between philosophy, strategy, actions of the enforcement regime outlined by May and Burby (1998 ) no longer holds. This results in a shift from economic incentives based on punishment to incentives based on prevention and the use of new monitoring and enforcement tools. We then illustrate our purpose using a case study of the use of co-regulation in the enforcement of pesticide residue limits in the French import industry for fresh produce.