Agro-Food Standards and Africa: An Introduction

Governing through standards — rather than through laws and regulations alone — emerged as a tendency in industrialized countries in the 1980s and 1990s. This occurred against a background of the rise of idealized market paradigms in the public sector, an unfolding of new discourses concerning governmental transparency and accountability and the growing political influence of issue-focused Non Government Organizations (NGOs) (Rose, 1996; Power, 1997; Brunsson, Jacobsson et al., 2000). The tendency spans public administration, cultural life and the economy — albeit in different forms in each context, driven by different constellations of actors and circumstances. As a result, while developments in standards may still occur as a result of changes in regulation, it is more illuminating to see standards as the dominant form taken by early twenty-first century regulation.