To adapt direct regulation to new policy arenas and make regulation less costly and time consuming to administer, regulatory variations have appeared that seek to ensure the same outcomes with more efficient use of resources. Modified direct regulation strategies such as Risk-based Regulation and Responsive Regulation retain the basic administrative structures of direct regulation under command-and-control frameworks, while modifying interactions with non-state actors in order to create a less burdensome, more effective and more cooperative regulatory process . In Risk-based Regulation, risk assessments direct inspections and enforcement toward those firms most likely to fail, while low-risk firms enjoy lighter regulation, motivating firms to build a record of compliance . Similarly, Responsive Regulation seeks to understand and resolve barriers to compliance, avoiding the use of enforcement resources to clear up cases of ignorance and misunderstanding, so that they may be used instead only for more serious cases of noncompliance .Process-oriented approaches such as Enforced self-regulation, Management-Based Regulation, Systems-based regulation, Meta-regulation and Principles-Based Regulation aim to control how firms act, rather than directly mandating end results. These styles seek to improve on traditional direct regulation by allowing those closest to the problem to design the solutions , requiring only that solutions be developed internally and put into place. One possible drawback of this approach is that the outcome itself is left uncertain even when regulations function optimally; the possibility remains that firms may be in total compliance with the procedural requirements of this type of regulation, without actually achieving the desired policy outcomes.

Since the 1990s, rolling greenhouse tables many governments have also undertaken efforts to broaden regulatory participation to include a wider array of views and interests . These efforts have been made with the goals of heightening public awareness of regulatory issues and improving the quality of regulation for normative , epistemic , and instrumental reasons. It is unclear however, whether the goals of broadened participation have been, or can be, achieved in practice . However, it can be hard to strike a balance between democratic goals and policy goals, and broadening participation is often expensive. Scholars have also have argued that the success or failure of participative policy projects can hinge on “institutional fit” between the policy process and the beliefs and norms embodied within participation . Nevertheless, co-management may offer the best chance of managing complex social and environmental problems within multi-level governance systems . Although these variations of direct regulation offer improved solutions and more efficient use of regulatory resources, new challenges emerge. Research suggests that risk-based approaches may still suffer from many of the problems of direct regulation because the top-down regulatory style is still not necessarily fully responsive to the needs of industry . Some scholars also question whether these modified approaches truly deliver on the initial promise of regulation by ensuring desired outcomes, or whether they actually result in diluted, less effective regulation .Regulation achieved by non-state entities can take a wide variety of forms, including Information-based Regulation, Private Regulation and Self-Regulation. These forms differ from command-and-control in that rule-making power and enforcement authority are held not by state regulators, but by non-state actors . Self-regulation describes a process where public regulators grant firms the power to define their own regulatory targets and the authority to police their own activities, either individually or through industry associations.

In the food system, these approaches borrow from recent developments in environmental governance that seek to address perceived failures and inefficiencies of state-led regulation by shifting regulatory power to markets and market actors . Enforcement authority in non-state regulation derives from supply chain relationships and from economic concerns, rather than from government. Information-based Regulation seeks to increase the public availability of information about firms’ performance to encourage compliance. In Private Regulation, private actors assume the roles traditionally played by public regulators, by defining targets and directing inspections and enforcement. Private standards typically function alongside and in addition to public regulation but may also act to supplant public regulation where public enforcement is lacking, public standards are insufficient, or where no public response yet exists. One of the most notable benefits of non-state approaches is that they can move more quickly than traditional public regulatory processes, producing timely technical decisions which might have taken longer to emerge from a more accountable, representative public regulatory process involving chambers of government and bureaucratic agencies. This nimbleness can be beneficial when responding to new and emerging threats such as the environmental hazards of new and as-yet-unregulated technologies, or newly recognized public health threats which do not yet have established regulatory benchmarks but for which human suffering might be averted by swift action before such regulation is produced. Although self-regulation and private regulation may seem like the fox guarding the hen house, competition among rival firms can encourage stronger self-regulation as firms watchdog each other independent of public regulatory enforcement, avoiding a race to the bottom. In some cases, private regulation that is viewed as successful or politically expedient may even become hardened into law, generating new public regulation where none previously existed . However, private regulation’s nimbleness and relative lack of bureaucracy can also be an Achilles heel. Whereas governments are accountable to their citizens if their regulatory standards are found to be faulty, no such accountability is necessarily built into privately controlled regulation. The market primarily exerts influence over such standards, and the market can become a vehicle with no driver at the wheel. Private strategies thus reflect the character of their creators; they are as lax or as rigorous, as representative or as mysterious, as complete or as cursory, as the firms and public regulatory efforts that pursue them . If industry associations successfully create ineffective mandatory standards or if firms choose to sign on to those voluntary standards which ask the least of them, the market may experience a downward convergence onto the least effective standards . Self-regulation and private regulation may also be pursued by firms that specifically wish to avoid or to weaken public regulation. Poorly designed or bad faith private regulatory efforts can provide equally poor outcomes.The United States and the United Kingdom have very different agricultural histories, as might be expected due to dissimilar geographies and historical settlement patterns. The history of UK agriculture precedes modern civilization, evolving from a background of early subsistence activities and feudal peasant agriculture. Enclosures of public lands in the early stages of the industrial revolution disenfranchised Britain’s rural agricultural populace, while the role of capitalist production-oriented agriculture expanded to feed growing urban work forces . The current UK agricultural system combines elements of the social and landscape heritage of Britain’s long history of rural family farming with the modern style of capitalist production, within the trade relationships and political linkages of the European Union . Landholdings still often follow historical patterns of family ownership and traditions of land management, even while growing commodity crops meant for international markets . As a consequence of agricultural intensification driven in part by the supply chain activities of powerful food retailers, UK farming has recently seen an increasing reliance on migrant labor beginning since the 1990s . In the US, agricultural histories differ sharply along regional lines, based on timing and character of early post-colonial settlement. California’s agricultural history shares little with that of the UK. California’s relatively recent and highly capitalist agricultural industry did not develop from a history of small-scale, independent family farms, nor from feudal landholdings. California’s native inhabitants did not farm the land, and at no point in subsequent settler history was California host to a small-scale agrarian populace .

Instead, from its establishment around 3 the time of the Gold Rush in the mid 1800s, California agriculture has always been intensive, large scale, market-oriented, ebb and flow rolling benches and dependent on hired labor primarily supplied by migrant and ethnic minority communities, often under extremely exploitative circumstances . Despite the divergent starting points of their agricultural histories, the UK and US both experienced an increase in the public visibility of environmental and public health problems in the late 1800s and early 1900s. A new era of progressive policies followed, aimed at reforming core industrial activities and solving collective action problems in the large-scale production of public goods such as clean water and clean air . In response to a wide array of factors including political regime changes, shifting public opinion, and the rising power of global agribusiness, the approach of the two states has shifted considerably over time. Early in the period of heightened environmental regulation that began among most developed nations in the 1960s and 1970s, the United States was recognized as a progressive leader. The earliest US risk regulation in the realms of environment and food during this time took a precautionary stance that prioritized the public interest and sought to place limits on the activities of industry through ambitious and comprehensive formal regulation on topics including water quality, air quality, product safety, vehicle emissions, and chemical safety. In contrast, although UK regulation had established regulatory bodies dedicated to environmental problems in the mid 1800s, UK environmental regulation during this period was, during this early period, less ambitious than environmental regulation in the US. UK regulatory efforts moved slowly and incrementally, developing multi-sectoral scientific consensus before the drafting of legislation, and relying on trust between industry and regulators rather than enforcement and sanctions.4 Beginning in the 1980s, a wave of neoliberal reforms and deregulation during the Reagan administration changed the tenor of US environmental and public health policy. US risk regulation became more conservative and less precautionary in its approach and more protective of industry, as environmental and public health regulation came to be seen as a tax on industrial economic growth, and US regulators eschewed precautionary policy in food safety partly out of concern that a precautionary stance might present a non-tariff barrier to trade . US environmental law originally referenced precautionary reasoning in decisions around early environmental reforms but Congress and the White House later declared it improper to create policy based on uncertain risks, favoring scientific risk assessment in place of precaution . On this basis, the US adopted ambitious scientific standards developed without formal industry input, requiring mandatory use of the most effective technologies. While some degree of collaboration and flexibility entered the system through the implementation efforts of local regulatory authorities, the basic architecture of the system was built to rein in the activities of industry through the use of stringent direct regulation. Around the same time, the character of UK regulatory efforts in the environmental and public health arena, following the approach taken by the European Commission , retained their focus on trust and consensus, and became increasingly motivated by the precautionary principle. The British style emphasized the evolution of smaller, incremental targets, developed with the cooperation of industry through collaborative site visits and inspections, in a legislative process out of view of the public eye. These targets typically included deep collaborative participation by industry groups and less focus on adherence to rigid standards, allowing a greater emphasis on informal and voluntary participation . By the late 1980s, progress made by the two states on a host of environmental and public health issues showed similar levels of improvement, despite the fact that the two states had approached these regulatory challenges through very different means. The key difference in transatlantic environmental and public health regulation that emerged by the turn of the century was in the attitude of industry toward environmental regulation. In the US, environmental regulation became a highly politically polarizing issue seen by industry as a hindrance to economic growth, while in the UK environmental regulation never became as contentious a political topic, and the relationship of business to government remained focused on compromise and conciliation.In both the US and UK prior to the 1980s, risk management in food and agriculture centered primarily on economic concerns such as commodity production and price supports. Food safety surveillance had existed in both nations since the late 1800s for products such as milk and meat, but food safety was not a leading regulatory focus . Growing awareness of the risk of pathogens in the food supply began to put food safety at the top of the regulatory agenda following the emergence of a new range of public health concerns which focused attention on food production practices and revealed the inadequacy of existing regulatory controls to deal with pathogen threats .