Public health is a major area of social regulation, tied closely to the rise of the regulatory state. Among public health standards, food safety standards were some of the first to be globalized, through the Codex Alimentarius Commission established in 1963. With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), these international food safety standards have taken on even greater importance, serving as a reference point for the WTO in resolving disputes between countries over trade barriers. Have these international food safety standards influenced domestic policies and, if so, in which directions and why? This article considers how the Codex food additive standard has influenced policy in Argentina and the Dominican Republic. It looks at the role and interaction of international, regional, and domestic actors and top-down, bottom-up, and horizontal directions of policy diffusion. It also examines the role played by powerful states in shaping international standards.

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The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter compares the role of central and local authorities in the US and the EU in formulating environmental regulations in three areas: automotive emissions for health related (criteria) pollutants, packaging waste, and global climate change. Automotive emissions are relatively centralised in both political systems. In the cases of packaging waste and global climate change, regulatory policy-making is shared in the EU, but is primarily the responsibility of local governments in the US. Thus, in some important areas, regulatory policy-making is more centralised in the EU. The most important role local governments play in the regulatory process is to help diffuse stringent local standards through more centralised regulations, a dynamic which has become recently become more important in the EU than in the US.

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) are federal systems in which the responsibility for environmental policy-making is divided or shared between the central government and the (member) states. The attribution of decision-making power has important policy implications. This chapter compares the role of central and local authorities in the US and the EU in formulating environmental regulations in three areas: automotive emissions for health related (criteria) pollutants, packaging waste, and global climate change. Automotive emissions are relatively centralised in both political systems. In the cases of packaging waste and global climate change, regulatory policy-making is shared in the EU, but is primarily the responsibility of local governments in the US. Thus, in some important areas, regulatory policy-making is more centralised in the EU. The most important role local governments play in the regulatory process is to help diffuse stringent local standards through more centralised regulations, a dynamic which has become recently become more important in the EU than in the US.