Szulecka, J., Bradshaw, C. orcid.org/0000-0002-3917-9250 and Principato, L. (2024) Food Waste Governance Architectures in Europe: Actors, Steering Modes, and Harmonization Trends. Global Challenges, 8 (11). 2300265. ISSN 2056-6646
Abstract
The scale of food waste across Europe is alarming, and its reduction is becoming an important public policy and governance issue. Sustainable Development Goal Target 12.3 constitutes a global attempt to galvanize system-level reductions. In response, layers of varied regulation and governance at regional and national levels have emerged. This paper studies the types of governance architectures visible across Europe, what policy interventions they bring, and whether responses to the food waste challenge are converging. It looks at four leading food waste jurisdictions—France, England, Norway, and Italy—and investigates the hidden realities obscured by the simplistic division of legislative/top-down versus voluntary/bottom-up approaches. It applies a governance matrix to understand the variety of food waste “steering modes”, exploring both the extent to which a regime is hierarchical and/or non-hierarchical and why. Notably, the paper also identifies some general tendencies in food waste governance, including legislative threats, challenges in distributing responsibility across the actors, focus on “low hanging fruits”, and an overall harmonization of policy responses in a neoliberal paradigm, with redistribution often pursued as a panacea for the food waste crisis.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). Global Challenges published by Wiley-VCH GmbH. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | food waste governance; food waste law; reduction targets SDG; voluntary agreements |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Law (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 31 Jul 2024 14:48 |
Last Modified: | 18 Feb 2025 14:27 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/gch2.202300265 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:215540 |