In an increasingly interconnected world, where the widespread travel of goods highlights our interconnectedness, who has the power to decide the global regulations that shape the production, processing and exchange of agri-food products? How are such decisions made and by whom? Who decides what is safe to eat? Whose definition of safe is used? Where is the way to the new cosmopolitanism? In this article we seek out answers to these questions through an analysis of global food safety regulation. We review the current legal structure of global agri-food governance and consider limitations in decision-making models, restricted transparency, limited public participation and insufficient democratic guarantees.Global food regulation necessitates transparent, participative and impartial mechanisms of policyand rule-making. However, a common global regulation must also consider and respect pluralism. We argue that the harmonization of global food regulation thus needs to follow a democratic pattern which pursues integration without compromising pluralism, and reduces fragmentation without denying legal and cultural differences. In this context, we propose a model for global decision-making that combines associative and deliberative democracy. We then propose a plan to engage the public in policy-making by using an interactive procedural mechanism of deliberation and by engaging civil society organisations in decision-making. Enhanced civil society participation in global agri-food governance has the capacity to increase efficiency, impartiality, transparency and democracy in the global policy-making process.

The article focuses on the importance of technical and scientific assessments in present public regulation, notably in extra-national governance. The necessity to rely on experts’ opinions in order to neutralize decisions, so to avoid arbitrariness and harmonize policies, is both crucial and increasingly predominant. Nonetheless, such evaluations are not always neutral, sound or independent. This may produce arbitrary decisions for regulatory measures that need to be at least impartial. Instead of proposing to shift the decision-making on behalf of discretionary or political regulators, the article insists on the idea of improving the moment of scientific assessment. The tool to increase the reliability of science-based opinions without compromising scientific neutrality is to realize a knowledge-based participation, only open to qualified interveners. The latter should be experts belonging to no-profit private associations pursuing public interests, with the aim to open up the discussion in uncertain fields of scientific investigation. This would make science democratic, but aims to legitimize its opinions – by adding democratic devices to scientific assessment – when they are not objective and have a regulatory effect, assuming that experts are exercising an (indirect) role of public regulators. The implementation of a mechanism of public participation in scientific assessments – limited to a selected representation of stakeholders qualified for their competence, knowledge and preparation – would enhance a scientific debate that would make scientific assessments plural without conditioning them to public opinion. Such a model could have advantages and some drawbacks, although the latter could be overcome with the application of an effective and efficient legal discipline covering the entire procedure.

Within the global polity several global regulatory regimes overlap and intersect without establishing one single and unitary legal order. Despite such fragmentation, each global regulatory regime constrains the behaviour of States and individuals through “induced compliance” and significantly impacts domestic regulation, influencing both the content and the way decisions are made. This also applies to the global regimes of food and water, where the interplay between different rules and actors (public/private, domestic/global) raises a number of questions on the complex relationship between the power makers that establish the rules and those who are affected by them. These regimes are particularly emblematic of the debate about the democratic quality of global polity. They also show the lack of balance among national governments, global institutions, and civil society organizations. As a matter of fact, at the global level, there is no directive representative democracy, but some forms of deliberative or procedural democracy, which emerge through the application of administrative procedures and formal guarantees in the decision-making processes. Among such tools, this article focuses on transparency and participation, which are two fundamental legal instruments featuring procedural legitimacy. The paper is divided in four sections. The last section contains three conclusive remarks: 1) an effective increment of transparency and participation in global decision-making would enhance pluralism, accountability and power-checking in the global polity; 2) even the increment of transparency and participation can present drawbacks, which need to be tackled and nullified by the application of specific procedural devices; 3) the main improvement would rely on procedural democracy as transparency and participation need to be combined with other administrative principles and guarantees, such as due process, duty to give reason, judicial review, and so on.