Underground kitchens, public fridges and local meals at strangers’ homes offer an interesting and economically attractive alternatives to traditional channels of food distribution. The new practices of food sharing facilitated by technological development and using new social media combine an interest in modern engaged consumerism with a promise of more sustainable food chains and waste reduction. The main objective of this article is to map and analyse the risks and regulatory challenges posed by the variety of emerging sharing economy practices in the food sector. Drawing on the identification of the key features of sharing economy and the specificity of food in that context, this article discusses various forms, scales and motivations behind the existing food sharing initiatives. The article describes three main categories of food sharing models, namely harvest sharing, meal sharing and leftover sharing, and illustrates them with concrete examples of networks or platforms. Against this background, the article scrutinizes the major risks and challenges of food sharing, ranging from individual and public health and safety to market fragmentation. Reviewing the available regulatory options to address these risks, and juxtaposing them with the risks stemming out of regulatory intervention as such, the contribution calls for balanced approach to food sharing governance in the European Union.

This mini-symposium of the European Journal of Risk Regulation focuses on the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which was concluded at COP-21 in December 2015. It has been called the ‘world's greatest diplomatic success’ and a ‘historic achievement,’ but also an ‘epic failure’ and even a ‘fraud’ and ‘worthless words.’ Disappointed with the Paris Agreement, a group of eleven climate scientists signed a declaration stating that it suffers from “deadly flaws” and gives “false hope;” they argue that the time for “wishful thinking and blind optimism” is over, and “the full spectrum of geo engineering” should be considered. The broad disagreement over the outcome of COP-21 in Paris (in particular, over its binding effect) illustrates not only the diverging expectations of interest groups, but also the antagonisms that arise in all areas of policy-making between the dogmatic and the pragmatic, the idealistic and the realistic, and the internationalists and nationalists.

Cars will become more autonomous and intelligent in the near future. Eventually, Autonomous Intelligent Cars (AICs) will contribute to road safety, will enable the mobilisation of disabled citizens and a will lead to a decrease of CO2 emissions. The European Union aims to stimulate responsible innovation in the field of AICs, in a way that (ethical) acceptability, sustainability and societal desirability are taken into account. The current legal frameworks are not observed to optimally facilitate innovation or successful societal deployment of AICs. This article explores challenges for both innovation and acceptance that follow from the current legal regimes on product liability, liability for motor vehicles and information privacy of consumers of AICs, and discusses these challenges in view of a regulatory balance that is to be reached between stimulation of innovation and consumer protection in the European Union.

Disputes over food safety standards –what in the language of trade policy are called sanitary and phytosanitary standards (SPS) – have been at the heart of many transatlantic trade rows between the US and the EU. Examples include the EU bans on the import of hormone–treated beef, on pork treated with growth–promoting additives, or on poultry washed in antimicrobial rinses to reduce the amount of microbes on meat. As a result, the potential impact of the ongoing negotiations to reach a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade agreement between the US and EU on EU food standards has, rightly, attracted a lot of attention and no little anxiety. Opposition to “Chlorhühnchen” has become the rallying–call for anti–TTIP activists in many countries. NGOs argue that “TTIP will sacrifice food safety for faster trade”. Critics highlight possible procedural rules requiring transparency of decision–making and early warning mechanisms which would give interested parties (including of course business firms and lobby groups) the opportunity to comment on planned rule–making which it is argued are likely to lead to ‘regulatory chill’.

Recognising the importance of science to climate policies, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (the ‘Paris Agreement’ or ‘Agreement’) stipulates that ‘an effective and progressive response to the urgent threat of climate change’ should be based on ‘the best available scientific knowledge.’ The terms ‘best available scientific knowledge’ or ‘best available science’ are used in several places throughout the agreement.

Web-based financial intermediation on a peer-to-peer (P2P) basis will eventually prevail as an economically superior form of organisation compared to the traditional banking business model. P2P lending is the most popular type of crowdfunding, whereby an internet platform collects small amounts of funds from individuals in a crowd to finance collectively a larger loan to individuals or businesses. Unlike a commercial bank, the platform does not take risks through its own contractual positions. Whereas banks accumulate risks by taking positions on their balance sheet, platforms decentralise the risks by spreading them to their users. The emergence of financial platform businesses challenges legislators and regulators in several respects: the “easy way” of modifying existing finance and banking laws is inadequate; the internal organisation and knowledge of staff is not well suited to regulating crowdfunding; and capital mediation by crowdfunding platforms requires a different regulatory approach than banking. Finally, there is no doubt that P2P lending platforms will in the long run need a dedicated, single European regulatory framework.

The leaked TTIP documents reveal that the EU and US are discussing the introduction of a detailed set of procedural requirements for the adoption of regulatory measures. Default provisions are set forth in the chapter on regulatory cooperation, applicable to goods and services. More specific provisions are being negotiated in the chapters on technical barriers to trade and on sanitary and phytosanitary measures. If they conflict with the regulatory cooperation chapter, they prevail.

This article analyses the regulatory cooperation chapter insofar as it pertains to trade in goods but to the exclusion of SPS matters and anything provided in the TBT chapter itself. The questions this article examines are to what extent the TTIP proposals expand upon the obligations the two parties have already taken on under WTO law and to what extent the resulting regulatory coordination is consistent withWTO law. It will be shown that the US proposals on procedure may constrain substantive regulatory discretion beyond what applies under the GATT and TBT Agreement of the WTO. It will alsobe shown that the needs to conduct trade impact assessments and a detailed explanation of the necessity of measures anticipate a legal challenge to necessity and will provide information of much use to complainants in meeting their burden of proof.

The regulation of nanomaterials is still surrounded by scientific uncertainty regarding their potential human health risks. It is therefore useful to consider learning approaches in the process of regulation. Effective regulation is conceptualised with regard to collaborative activities of state and non-state actors that enable mutual learning regarding the health risks of nanomaterials. A theoretical framework is offered for studying learning processes in the area of occupational safety and health. Drawing on the network governance literature, three learning types (namely substantive, strategic, and institutional learning) are distinguished. Analytical conditions are proposed and applied to the case of nanomaterials in Germany, thereby offering insights into learning processes in industry-initiated collaborative activities. It is concluded that the development of trust among network collaborators is decisive for learning processes. Accordingly, a proposal for research into specific stages of trust development is made.

The May 2016 leak of draft texts produced within the context of the on–going Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations has provided an interesting insight into the positions of the EU and US with regard to different dimensions of regulatory cooperation, with some chapters being complete or near completion (as other articles in this mini–symposium discuss), and others still in a more rudimentary format. One such field of regulation, covered in the leaked ‘Tactical State of Play’ document, covers geographical indicators (hereafter GIs). However, this coverage is very brief, stating that ‘discussions focused on the preparation of an intersessional discussion prior to the next round’. GIs, marks identifying the geographical origin, and by extension (so the argument goes) quality of goods, have continued to be a source of consternation in international trade regulation, with states unable to see eye–to–eye on how they should be protected, if at all.

This brief opinion piece draws upon behavioural and cognitive research to argue that the Paris Agreement's goal of keeping global temperature change below 2 degrees Celsius sets a psychologically powerful baseline against which future policy failures can be measured. When international law successfully triggers perception of a baseline, it can lead decision makers to perceive deviations from that baseline as “losses.” This implicates loss aversion, which provides an additional motivation to achieve international norms. The psychological impacts of this new status quo may end up being more powerful and more durable than either the unusual structure of the document or the domestic implementation questions that have already attracted so much scholarly debate.

The sharing economy has become a reality in many sectors, including energy. Energy consumers are increasingly able and willing not only to produce their own energy and thus become prosumers, but also to sell this energy on the local or national energy market along with ‘traditional’ energy market players. Thus, the role of prosumers is de facto extended as to include the parallel roles of consumers, producers, suppliers and traders. Against this background, this article inquires whether it is possible for prosumers to share energy under the current Dutch regulatory framework. This question has been evaluated from the theoretical perspective of the regulatory disconnection between innovation and regulation.

Ulrich Beck's Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity provides a lens through which we can analyze contemporary debates over risk regulation of agricultural biotechnology. This article establishes the political and cultural context into which genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were introduced in the European Union, by reviewing the HIV-contaminated blood scandal, mad cow crisis, and dioxin contamination episode. These public health and food safety scandals exemplify the side effects of modernization as outlined by Beck. Beck also predicted the development of a solidarity arising from the public's anxiety over the global distribution of modernization's risks. The impact of these cases on risk regulation illustrates the political and social reaction to the invisible, global risks of late modernity. The subsequent response to this reaction in European risk regulation further demonstrates the tension between a globalizing market and public anxiety in risk society.

There has been an increasing interest in making legal decision-making and scholarship scientific or inter-disciplinary, without there being any interrogation of how or why this should be done. This has resulted in polarised views of the importance of science on one hand, and the primacy of democracy on the other. Such polarisation is not helpful primarily because both ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ remain unintelligible to those who do not have access to the particular epistemology that supports their usage. In this article, I seek to reconceptualise the conflict between democracy and science as the association of legal decision-makers and scholars with expert inquiry. I further conceptualise such association as a process that involves normative reductionism of testimonial exchange. Despite a claim to ‘a culture of justification’ in legal systems such as the European Union, the process of normative reductionism is essentially arbitrary. I seek to articulate a framework where this process may be approached in a disciplined manner, concentrating on the role of mediation and moderation of expert knowledge.

The rise of the sharing economy is transforming the way we produce and consume goods and services. This transformation requires a revision of current legal rules concerning sectors where the sharing economy is emerging. Taking the regulation of the taxi industry as a main example, this article analyses why those rules ought to be reviewed, the obstacles law makers have to face in order to perform such a task, and the regulatory strategies they could use for that purpose. The paper considers a variety of regulatory approaches including regulatory impact assessment, legal variation, the coexistence of different legal regimes, experimental legislation and compensation.

Opponents of the transatlantic trade and investment partnership treaty (TTIP) fear that the EUmight lose the capacity to protect public health as it deems appropriate. The freedomto regulate would be jeopardized because TTIP would bind the EU to the United States’ regulatory interests, which are expressly or implicitly assumed to live up to a ‘lower’ standard than those in the EU. The ‘TTIP–leaks’ provide a good opportunity to examine the potential impact of the agreement on EU public health regulation. This brief contribution uses as its starting point the document “Tactical State of Play of the TTIP negotiations” (hereafter “Tactical Document”) of March 2016, and focuses on pharmaceuticals and medical devices. In light of the statements in this document, we query what would change for the EU consumer, and what would be the impact on the EU regulators’ role in protecting public health.

In the coming few decades, the world is facing three related problems.

First, agriculture contributes to climate change to a considerable extent. In its Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC's Working Group III concludes that the AFOLU sector (agriculture, forestry and other land use) is responsible for just under a quarter (∼10 – 12 GtCO2eq/yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions. Usually, a distinction is made between non-CO2 emissions, in particular methane (NH4) emitted by livestock and rice cultivation, and nitrous oxide (N2O) caused by the use of synthetic fertilizers and the application of manure on soils and pasture. Methane and Nitrous oxide have 25 times and 300 times stronger impact on the climate than CO2 respectively. CO2 emissions from agriculture are mainly caused by deforestation and peatland drainage. Emissions from agriculture have been rising on a yearly basis since 1990, although with important regional differences (they went down in Europe and up in Asia).

Standing determines a person's ability to obtain judicial review of a legal act by the government. Judicial review of EU measures, including risk regulatory measures, is an important device to ensure that the rule of law is respected. Even after the changes brought about by the Lisbon Treaty, private parties still have limited standing rights under EU law to challenge EU risk regulations. While they are able to challenge “decisions” addressed to them (or, in some cases, addressed to others), they generally have been unable to claim standing at the European courts to seek review of generally binding rules. These restricted standing rights for private parties have been the subject of debate and criticism, both before and after the changes brought about by the Lisbon Treaty.

The leak of confidential documents on 2 May 2016 by GreenpeaceNetherlands allows some preliminary conclusions on both the scope and success of the negotiations so far. As regards the pharmaceuticalmarket, the current state of affairs combines the promise of steps forward with the prospect of concerning standstills. This short opinion follows key points emerging from the leaked documents n.9 (“RegulatoryCooperation”) andn.16 (“TacticalState ofPlay”) that are directly relevant to the pharmaceutical market. The themes that will be briefly discussed are, first, the regulatory cooperation mechanisms emerging fromdoc. n.9 in comparison to current cooperation processes in pharmaceutical regulation. The leaked papers suggest positive and commendable (yet far from conclusive) developments towards amore transparent and regulated framework for cooperation, while perpetuating concerns regarding fundamental policy choices and prevalence ofmercantile imperatives over competing public interests.

The global obesity epidemic was in focus at the 7th Summer Academy on Global Food Law and Policy in Gexco/Bilbao in July 2015. It approached this accelerating public health concern from the angle of risk regulations as linked to processing, trade, marketing and choice/consumption of foodstuffs, addressing also risks of negative impacts on public health at the consumer end. A wealth of expertise enlightened participants about current developments regarding EU and US legislation on risk assessments and risk management.