Rethinking Contested Governance: The case of food regulation.

In 2006, Ansell & Vogel (2006) presented the concept of contested governance in food safety regulation as a way to encapsulate the tension between various different stakeholders and authorities at the national and international levels in the process of shaping food safety policies in the context of the European Union. As the scholars argue: “Contested governance illuminates the particularly intense and broad-based conflict about the foundational assumptions and institutional frameworks through which a policy domain is governed” (p.11) In this light, the concept of contested governance has been understood as efforts from different stakeholders to challenge the legitimacy of existing institutional arrangements creating disturbances while also attributing a negative essence to the whole idea of contestation (Ansell & Torfing, 2017). This scholarly approach has marked the way contested governance has been approached since then. In this paper we offer a nuanced perspective on contested governance, arguing that challenging institutional grounds and assumptions can also have a positive effect in the ways food regulation is evolving. By doing that, we aim to highlight the contestable nature of food related institutional frameworks, understanding their reproduction and evolution as an interplay of power relations expressed through contestation and continuation of existing policy arrangements. Our approach helps us to map out and reflect the dynamic and multifaced character of governance as institutions evolve through contestation (Rigkos-Zitthen & Granberg, 2024) and compromise (Rostbøll, 2023). By focusing on a comparative analysis of institutions related to risk assessment and risk management in Denmark and Greece we explore the ways which different political, social and cultural factors play a role in contesting and shaping the ways in which different regulatory institutions approach similar food related problems differently.