The Nexus Between the World Trade Organization and Codex Alimentarius: A Social Network Analysis Approach

This paper investigates the nexus between institutional design and the structure and composition of regulatory networks. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the establishment and design of the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) and its effect on Codex Alimentarius, a standard-setting organization in the area of food safety. The SPS Agreement, established as a result of the WTO Uruguay Round in 1995, explicitly endorses Codex as the standard-setting organization for food safety. WTO members shall play full part in Codex and base their SPS measures on the standards developed by Codex. The principal objective of this paper is to investigate whether and, if so, how this endorsement has affected the working of Codex. Founded in 1963 and jointly run by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), Codex presents an hybrid regulatory network in which delegations from 188 member states as well as a myriad of non-state actors from industry, academia and non- governmental organizations negotiate and develop food safety standards. The central argument of this paper is that the WTO's endorsement of Codex has hardened a previous soft-law regime which, in turn, has resulted in a politicization of the standard-setting processes through two mechanisms. First, the WTO's endorsement of Codex has reduced state and non-state actors' ability for forum-shopping in the area of food safety. Second, as the SPS Agreement obliges WTO members to base future SPS measures on the standards developed by Codex, state and non-state actors have an increased incentive to actively participate and shape the standard-setting processes in order to minimize adjustment costs to future SPS measures. State actors may face political adjustment costs if future SPS measures are not in line with their regulatory philosophy. Non-state actors, in particular firms, face economic adjustment costs if they have to adapt their production processes to meet future SPS measures if these differ from the ones they are currently compliant with. This argument is in line with a small body of research that has assessed the linkage between the WTO and Codex through a selection of case studies and interviews. This paper contributes to this literature by studying the WTO-Codex relationship more systematically, using a newly created dataset on the participation of state and non-state actors in the complete sample of over 800 technical committee meetings of Codex since 1963. The dataset essentially presents a longitudinal, undirected, valued affiliation network which captures the number of state and non-state actors negotiating in committee meetings over the past 55 years. Relying on recent advancements in the analysis of multi-mode longitudinal networks, this empirical approach allows for a systematic study of the politically powerful coalitions formed among and between state and non-state actors and how these may have changed over time, pre- and post the SPS Agreement. More broadly, this paper allows revisiting the debate on the interaction and importance of state and non-state actors in global economic governance.