 The Taming of the StewTimothy D. Lytton The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2017, vol. 670, issue 1, 78-92 Abstract: Based on a case study of food safety governance, this article examines how rule-makers can employ additional intermediaries to address agency problems between the rule-makers and the initial intermediaries upon whom they rely to govern targets of regulation. Reliance on additional intermediaries can reduce agency problems between rule-makers and initial intermediaries, without replicating those problems between the rule-makers and the additional intermediaries. This analysis also reveals that, in some cases, intermediaries make rules, which blurs the distinction between rule-makers and intermediaries. Moreover, in complex governance networks, such as the food safety system, it is misleading to attribute the origin of many governance standards to authoritative “rule-makers.†Instead, standards emerge out of network interactions. The article concludes that by favoring the term “regulator†rather than “rule-maker,†the RIT model can avoid mischaracterizing rulemaking in complex regulatory systems without compromising its explanatory power with regard to reliance on intermediaries. Keywords: food safety; regulatory governance; third-party auditing; intermediaries; network theory (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:670:y:2017:i:1:p:78-92 Access Statistics for this article More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |
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