Institutional Design and the Governance of Regulatory Networks

International standards play an important role in the governance of global food trade. Whether it is the minimum amount of cocoa contained in chocolate or the maximum level of hormone residues in beef, there is a standard for almost every food product that can be traded internationally. Founded in 1963 by the WHO and FAO, the Codex Alimentarius has been a prominent standard-setting body for voluntary food standards. This changed in 1995, when the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) explicitly encouraged its member governments to establish national SPS measures consistent with the international standards, guidelines and recommendations developed by the Codex Alimentarius. In line with the existing literature on indirect governance, this article argues that this legalization of the Codex Alimentarius has upgraded its standards from being voluntary to being de facto binding rules that determine international market access. As a result, political and economic actors have an increased incentive to strategically participate in the standard-setting processes and to influence the standards in their interest. This, in turn, is expected to alter the informal power distribution among actors and thus their influence on standard design. To investigate the consequences of the WTO’s legalization of the Codex Alimentarius, a new dataset has been compiled. Codex Alimentarius presents a hybrid regulatory network in which public and private actors interact in highly specialized technical committees. The dataset contains information on the number of delegates of 196 national delegations, 327 non-governmental (NGOs) and 56 inter-governmental organizations (IGOs) that participated in the 830 meetings the 44 Codex Alimentarius committees held between 1963 and 2019. A preliminary analysis confirms the conjecture that the WTO’s legalization of Codex Alimentarius is associated with an increase in the participation of political and economic actors in the standard-setting processes. This increase is found to be larger for national delegations and (industry dominated) NGOs than for IGOs, potentially reflecting their higher political and economic stakes in the standards, respectively. The increased participation in the standard-setting processes is conjectured to have altered the power distribution among actors. Social Network Analysis is currently being explored in an attempt to map actors’ position (their centrality), arguably a proxy for influence, within the regulatory network over time and, in particular, before and after the WTO SPS Agreement. Preliminary results indicate that actors’ centralities are unequally distributed and influential positions within the network are occupied by a small group of public and private actors. The results also suggest that the composition of this group has changed after the WTO delegated the regulatory authority for standard development to the Codex Alimentarius. Relying on the investigation of the WTO SPS Agreement and the Codex Alimentarius, this article provides an empirical study of the (potentially unintended) consequences of institutional design on the governance of regulatory networks.