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Governing and Governance in the Agri-Food Sector and Traceability

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Ethical Traceability and Communicating Food

In this chapter food governance is depicted as a dynamic process, both occurring across and involving actors from the public sector, the corporate sector and civil society. Governing has given way to governance in the sense that private governance forms are increasingly enrolled and recognized by the state. Indeed public governance can follow in the wake of initiatives pioneered in the private sector. Governance according to this interpretation thus hybridizes public forms of governing with private schemes of governance. This approach to understanding the nature of governance provides a context for further evaluation of the differing but overlapping forms of agri-food traceability that were introduced in Chapters 1 and 2. The political and institutional policy contexts for traceability are located within a multilevel governance framework for food reaching up from national (and sub-national, or local and regional) to European and global levels, and involving a multiplicity of attentive actors from across the public, corporate and non-governmental sectors. The core of this dynamic is the interaction of public and private governance schemes in the agri-food sector which can result in new governance forms for agrifood standards.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Food Policy, City University, London, UK

    David Barling

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  1. David Barling
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Ethics and Law, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Christian Coff

  2. Centre for Food Policy, City University, London, UK

    David Barling

  3. Applied Philosophy Group, Wageningen University, Netherlands

    Michiel Korthals

  4. Department of Manufacturing and Management, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

    Thorkild Nielsen

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Barling, D. (2008). Governing and Governance in the Agri-Food Sector and Traceability. In: Coff, C., Barling, D., Korthals, M., Nielsen, T. (eds) Ethical Traceability and Communicating Food. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8524-6_3

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