The politics of proportionality in food safety governance

This paper advances a nuanced account of the contested governance of food safety grounded in the principle of policy proportionality. We conceptualize proportionality not as a techno-scientific dispute, but as an amalgam of political priorities presented as a normative benchmark around which institutions design policy instruments. These instruments, however, frequently fail to address policy problems in a coordinated and timely manner. Drawing on two European cases – the dioxin crisis and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the European Union – we argue that governance contestation stems primarily from underlying political priorities and value conflicts, rather than from technocratic disagreements among food-safety authorities. Furthermore, in contrast to existing scholarship, we show that contested governance may function as a form of political and policy decompression, enabling institutions to manage problems that are otherwise intractable within prevailing policy designs.