The Practical Logic Of Grassroots Food Safety Regulation And Law Enforcement

This study takes the status quo of food safety regulation and law enforcement in Administration for Market regulation of District C in City M as research object with ethnographic method and "the residual regulation right—grass-root law enforcement officers — law enforcement process" as an analysis framework,describing and analyzing the relationship between the food safety residual regulation right operation and the adjustment of law enforcement at the primary level as well as exploring the impact of interaction between the two on the effectiveness of grassroots law enforcement.First of all,under the international background of risk societies and regulatory countries as well as the China’s accession to the World Trade Organization,frequent occurrences of domestic food safety incidents and social trust crisis,the presupposition function of food safety regulation and enforcement at the primary level is to prevent systemic food safety risk originating from traditional food safety problems doubled with the risks from food law and standards,government regulatory agency as well as derivation and failure in politic field.Under this preset function,the central government of China empowers the local government at or above the county level the residual regulation right with overall responsibility for food safety regulation.Furthermore,this study discusses the four stages during the operation process of the residual regulation right,namely: staff distribution,goal coordination,tool selection and discretion control.In the first staff distribution and arrangement stage,food safety regulation departments at the primary level are still faced with the problem of lacking enough staff that was formed in the former Industrial and Commercial Department following the traditional division of grid network labor model.As a result,there are insufficient personnel and not enough professional regulation ability to complete the required tasks with dependence on the previous grid labor model in market regulation.In the second stage of goal setting,the local government and its food safety regulation departments allocate obligations that should have been undertaken by other law enforcement subjects under a pressure-based system,leading them to be forced to undertake multiple policy objectives in their daily routine and thus they can only react flexibly which is named as "Jian zi da zi" in their dialect.In the third stage of tool selection,food safety regulation departments at the primary level require their personnel to adopt the "double random inspection system" in the special law food safety enforcement action and sample inspection.However,the primary level law enforcement personnel fail to meet the applicable conditions of "double random inspection system".In the stage of discretion control,because small-scale food producers and operators are unable to bear "the most severe punishment" stipulated in the Food Safety Law and the formulation of national standards for food safety does not take into account their adaptation difficulties with the pressure of the "four strictest policies",governments at the primary level and their food safety regulatory authorities fail to adopt the rules of discretionary application to reduce penalties,which makes law enforcement hard to fully conduct.Based on the action mentality of "making their living and letting others survive at the meantime",law enforcement officers at the primary level make full use of the opaque,undisclosed and highly centralized discretion control procedures within the law enforcement departments to deliver consent on the final result of administrative punishment between the state,operators and law enforcement departments,which has led to the discretion power expansion of food safety regulatory law enforcement agencies and their personnel at the primary level.Regarding to law enforcement process,the effectiveness of food safety regulation and law enforcement at the primary level is the result of the interaction between the top-down operation of residual regulation right and the adjustment of law enforcement personnel.Due to the unreasonable allocation and application of the residual regulation right and the inefficiency in operation,the law enforcement personnel at the primary level face quite a few "impossible tasks" under the constraints of limited resources and capabilities in the organizational dilemma.The political pressure of food safety and the limitation of legal system aggravate the plight of law enforcement personnel at the primary level.Therefore,these law enforcement personnel adjust their expected goal from "due diligence" to "due diligence but without undertaking full responsibility" and then adopt adjustment strategy,which leads to the formalization of daily regulation and law enforcement.In order to make up for the effectiveness lack of food safety regulation caused by the formalization of daily regulation and law enforcement,governments at all levels and their food safety regulation departments frequently issue special action plans,resulting in the regularization of special law enforcement.The two regulars coexist and interact as a cycle,putting food safety regulation and enforcement at the primary level into an overall weak situation.To sum up,this study puts forward the dual dimension to better understand the food safety regulation and law enforcement at the primary level,revealing that the primary levels law enforcement personnel should have undertaken tasks that can be completed.It is considered that the law enforcement mentality of "trying luck",responding to the situation flexibly and "making their living and letting others survive at the meantime" are the proper expressions of the legal consciousness of law enforcement personnel at the primary level.It is put forward that the operation of residual regulation shapes the organizational dilemma of food safety regulation and law enforcement at the primary level in this thesis.Based on above-mentioned analysis,suggestions to improve the effectiveness of food safety regulation and law enforcement at the primary level are finally given in this research.