Competitive Convergence: Mechanisms, Scope Conditions, and Lessons from the Case of Indian Food Safety Reform

Abstract

In 2006, India began formally reconstructing its national food safety policy, subsuming over seven laws and agencies into a single streamlined regulatory authority. This moment of reform offers a "most likely" test case for theories of global policy convergence. Scholars across multiple fields predict that national politics are becoming more similar over time. Those predictions are especially strong in the field of food safety policy, as the WTO now mandates that member states align with an encyclopedic policy resource called the Codex Alimentarius. The dissertation asks whether, how, and why we see both global pressures for and actual evidence of convergence in the Indian case. I ask if the details of the case map onto the prevailing account in sociology, which predicts convergence as a result of spreading political culture; the sociology of food's broad predictions of both convergence and low political autonomy vis a vis global trade mandates; or the prevailing account in political science, which sees domestic regulatory change as a result of global competitions for consumer markets. I find very limited convergence in the Indian case, mostly limited to a nascent movement toward norms of "science-based" regulation. I also find that theories of regulatory competition best explain why India has converged to the extent it has, though the case suggests new causal mechanisms whereby trade agreements and economic competition generate regulatory change.