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Outsourcing Regulatory Decision-making:

“International” Epistemic Communities, Transnational Firms,

and Pesticide Residue Standards in India

Amy A. Quark, William & Mary

Forthcoming in Science, Technology, & Human Values

Abstract

How do “international” epistemic communities shape regulatory contests between transnational firms and civil society organizations in the global South? With the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO), member states committed to basing trade-restrictive national regulations on science-based “international” standards set by “international” standard-setting bodies. Yet we know little about how the WTO regime has shaped the operation of epistemic communities and, in turn, how epistemic communities articulate with national policy-making processes in the global South. Building on work in the new political sociology of science, I argue that neoliberal globalization and the establishment of the WTO have created incentives for Western epistemic communities to at once cast themselves as “international” under the WTO regime and orient their scientific agendas towards the priorities of transnational firms. Moreover, this transformation of epistemic communities has created opportunities for transnational firms facing contentious policy environments in the global South to effectively outsource regulatory decision-making to “international” epistemic communities that can claim legal status under the WTO regime. Empirically, I focus on the case of one Western epistemic community—the AOAC International—and its claim to epistemic jurisdiction over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India.

Introduction

How do “international” epistemic communities shape regulatory contests between

transnational firms and civil society organizations in the global South? Historically,

national states have held the power to choose what scientific advice to take while

balancing the demands of competing interest groups. In this context, epistemic

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communities, as networks of professionals, have competed to claim what Winickoff

(2015:3) terms epistemic jurisdiction, or the authority “to produce, interpret or warrant

technical knowledge for a given political community, topical arena, or geographical

territory” (see Haas 1992). This is particularly true of “boundary organizations,” such as

standard-setting bodies, that “mediate between the institutions of ‘science’ and the

institutions of ‘politics’” by providing scientific advice to policymakers (Miller

2001:482; Guston 2011).

However, with the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in

1995 the power to confer epistemic jurisdiction no longer rests with the national state

alone but rather has become subject to multi-level governance (Winickoff 2015). WTO

member states have committed to basing any trade-restrictive regulations on science-

based “international” standards set by “international” standard-setting bodies. The WTO

has thus created opportunities for epistemic communities to claim their “international”

status and thus extend their claims to epistemic jurisdiction on a transnational scale. Yet

we know little about how the WTO regime has shaped the operation of epistemic

communities and, in turn, how epistemic communities articulate with national policy-

making processes in the global South.

The scholarly tradition that is perhaps best suited to understanding the

implications of the WTO regime is the new political sociology of science (NPSS).

Building on the microsociological accounts of the social construction of knowledge

forged in science and technology studies (e.g. Latour 1983), NPSS scholars employ

meso- and macro-sociological analyses to reveal the political and institutional dynamics

that shape the production of scientific knowledge and science policy (Frickel and Moore

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2006; Moore et al. 2011). Yet, most research in this vein has focused on the role of

epistemic communities in Western domestic policy contexts (Hess 2016; Moore et al.

2011; for exceptions, see Kimura 2013, 2015; Kinchy 2010, 2012; Winickoff and Bushey

2010). While NPSS scholars do note the importance of the international regulatory

environment, less attention has been given to how Western epistemic communities have

responded to pressures to “internationalize” under the WTO regime and claim policy

relevance in the global South.

In this article, I ask: 1) how have Western epistemic communities who provide

scientific advice on issues of regulatory protection responded to opportunities created by

the WTO regime and, in turn, 2) how do these epistemic communities shape the

contestation among transnational firms and civil society organizations in the global South

over national regulations? Empirically, I focus on the case of one Western epistemic

community—the AOAC International (Association of Analytical Communities)1—and its

claim to epistemic jurisdiction over pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India.

Epistemic communities that are based in Western countries or are already organized

transnationally are likely to be the major beneficiaries of increased demand for

“international” standards under the WTO regime (see Higgins and Tamm Hallström

2007). The AOAC thus represents a critical case as an epistemic community that has long

claimed epistemic jurisdiction over food safety issues in the US and in interstate

organizations like the Codex Alimentarius Commission (Codex) and is thus likely to

compete for epistemic jurisdiction under the WTO regime. Western epistemic

1 AOAC was originally the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists. In 1991, the legal name was changed to AOAC International, and the Association informally refers to itself as an association of analytical communities.

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communities like the AOAC are most likely to shape policy contests in the global South

when foreign investment and/or trade—and thus WTO obligations—are at stake. As

such, I consider the role of the AOAC in a case of food safety standards setting in India

that implicated transnational investors. In 2003, the Centre for Science and the

Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based non-governmental organization (NGO), issued a

report claiming that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products sold in India contained dangerous

levels of pesticide residues. This set off a long and contentious policy debate in which

competing claims to epistemic jurisdiction were made in relation to WTO obligations,

allowing us to explore how AOAC shaped the policy contest. The main work of the

AOAC is the validation of analytical methods that set limits on the breadth and

magnitude of food safety regulation.

To explore this case, I employed the extended case method to consider how

debates over science and regulation are articulated transnationally as the boundary work

of a standard-setting body intersects with national policy making processes in the global

South (Burawoy 1991). To this end, I collected and analyzed over 600 primary

documents from a range of sources and conducted 25 semi-structured interviews during

field research in New Delhi.2 Through this analysis, I extend NPSS scholarship in two

2More specifically, I collected and analyzed data from four main sources. First, I analyzed a wide array of primary documents produced by AOAC itself and its members, including two organizational biographies and over 120 other documents, including meeting minutes, press releases, scientific journal articles, newsletters, and webpages. Second, I analyzed over 300 newspaper articles from a range of different English-language news sources in India and abroad. These were collected through the India Environmental Portal and Google News and include articles published from January 1, 2003 to January 1, 2014 to ensure collection of coverage during the entire time when pesticide residue standards for soft drinks were being debated. Third, I analyzed over 200 other primary documents, including press releases, court documents, websites, minutes from meetings, government reports, etc. on the Indian case. These were collected in person from activists in New Delhi, online through the India Environmental Portal, and through extensive searches on the websites of various Indian government agencies and Indian NGOs. Finally, I conducted 25 semi-structured interviews during a field visit to New Delhi. I employed a theoretical sampling strategy to choose interview subjects, which targeted actors with potentially different perspectives on food safety

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ways. First, I argue that Western epistemic communities compete to claim epistemic

jurisdiction by engaging in boundary work, or the creation of rules, norms, and

procedures that legitimate their organization as “international” under the WTO regime

(see Gieryn 1983; Latour 1983). For the AOAC, however, efforts to cast the organization

as inclusive through both its “international” membership and consensus-based decision

making were in tension with the need to become more responsive to the regulatory

priorities of transnational firms with the roll-back of public funding for regulatory

science. Second, I argue that this boundary work and the legal status of “international”

epistemic communities under the WTO regime shapes perceptions of who can claim

epistemic jurisdiction in domestic policy contests in the global South. In the contest over

pesticide residue standards for soft drinks in India, a successful civil society campaign

drew on “international” standards to compel the Indian government to regulate pesticide

residues in soft drinks, despite strong opposition from transnational soft drink firms. At

the same time, transnational firms weakened the standards by effectively outsourcing

regulatory decision-making to the AOAC as the “right” kind of “international” epistemic

community that could claim epistemic jurisdiction under the WTO regime and advocate

their regulatory preferences to the Indian government.

Background

In 2003, the Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based

NGO, issued a scientific report claiming that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo products sold in

India contained dangerous levels of pesticide residues. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo had come

standard-setting in India. I conducted interviews with 5 scientists, 6 government officials, 6 representatives of non-governmental organizations, 3 representatives of domestic industry, 3 representatives of transnational firms, and 2 representatives of foreign/international organizations.

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to control 80-90 percent of the $2 billion Indian market since the adoption of

liberalization policies by the Indian government in the early 1990s (Bremner 2006).

Making a claim to epistemic jurisdiction, CSE called on the Indian government to set and

enforce standards for pesticide residues in carbonated beverages, as well as to overhaul

the broader regulatory framework for pesticide use in India that was contaminating soft

drinks and municipal drinking water alike (Vedwan 2007). CSE advocated maximum

residue limits for pesticides in soft drinks similar to the EU standards for drinking water:

0.1 parts per billion (ppb) for individual pesticides and 0.5 ppb for multiple residues

(Mathur et al. 2003). CSE claimed that pesticide levels in the soft drinks they tested were

between 11 and 70 times the EU maximums (CSE 2004). As protestors burned effigies of

Coke bottles, sales of Coca-Cola products dropped by 30-40% after a 75% five-year

growth trajectory and 25-30% year-to-date growth (Hills and Welford 2005; Stecklow

2005).

Within days of the release of the CSE report, the government announced the

establishment of a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC)—only the fourth in the

country’s history—mandated to verify CSE’s claims and suggest criteria for establishing

safety standards (CSE 2004; JPC 2004:xv). Throughout the JPC process, the

transnational soft drink firms remained “vehemently opposed” to regulation and

particularly to the EU standards (as cited in JPC 2004:2.60). Nonetheless, when the JPC

presented its unanimous report to Parliament in 2004, it largely supported CSE’s position

(JPC 2004). The JPC confirmed the presence of pesticide residues in soft drinks,

applauded the “whistle blowing act of CSE,” and suggested that regulations similar to

those of the EU were likely warranted (JPC 2004:1.96).

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Yet, the JPC report also signaled that the heart of the matter was the question of

legitimate epistemic jurisdiction. While CSE’s findings of pesticide residues appeared

valid, it remained unclear which epistemic community could provide legitimate analytical

methods that would determine what standards could be set (e.g. how strict, for which

pesticides, etc.). Under the WTO regime, methodologies used to enforce domestic

regulation should be validated by international standard-setting organizations when

possible, and the JPC affirmed that “Codex matters are of very serious nature under the

WTO regime” (JPC 2004:2.173). The JPC concluded that “Indian testing methodologies

should not be inferior in any sense in comparison to [“international” standard-setting

bodies like] CODEX, WHO, ISO or AOAC” (JPC 2004:4.78).

CSE had employed methodologies from the United States Environmental

Protection Agency (US EPA) (Mathur et al. 2003:9). CSE argued that the US EPA

methods were “used by governments around the world” and questions about their

credibility amounted to the soft drink companies “using the bogey of ‘good science’ and

‘global practice’ in their opposition to be regulated” (CSE 2006b, a). The soft drink

companies, in contrast, claimed that the US EPA methods were not in fact relevant

international methodological standards as they were general methods for detecting

pesticide residues in liquids and gases and were not developed specifically for soft drinks

(Mandavilli 2007:707).

Five years later, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare officially

adopted standards for pesticide residues in soft drinks based on the standard

methodologies endorsed by an “international” epistemic community, the AOAC

International (Gazette of India 2009). This was a success for CSE as standards were set

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where none previously existed. At the same time, the standards were not exactly the

strong EU standards they had hoped for. Compared to the standards both CSE and an

Indian government agency, the Bureau of Indian Standards, had recommended, the

standards officially adopted were ten times more lenient, applied to half as many

pesticides, and did not include a multiple residue limit (compare Gazette of India 2009

and JPC 2004). This outcome raised critical questions regarding how this “international”

epistemic community shaped the contestation among the transnational soft drink firms

and CSE over these national regulations.

Neoliberal Globalization and Lopsided Fields of Research in the West

Scholars of the NPSS offer a powerful set of theoretical tools to begin an

exploration of “international” epistemic communities given their focus on the

institutional and structural dynamics shaping agenda setting in scientific fields. NPSS

research is driven by a critical question: if science is supposed to offer objective advice in

a policy debate, why is it that science seems to favor elites? The answer is an historically-

grounded explanation of the emergence of a “lopsided field of scientific research”

alongside the rise of neoliberal globalization (Hess 2009:306; see also Hess 2007, 2016;

Moore et al. 2011). For NPSS scholars, the efforts of Western economic and political

elites to shift government policy towards trade liberalization from the 1970s onwards had

a profound influence on the research agendas of basic science in the US and Europe.

Government funding increasingly prioritized research aligned with the innovation

economy, private R&D grew, and new market-oriented mechanisms were introduced for

evaluating academic output. These shifts created institutional incentives for scientists to

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reorient their research agendas towards market priorities (Berman 2012, 2014; Hess

2016; Moore et al. 2011).

This reorientation of scientific research agendas reveals one reason “why science

works better or more often for some groups than for others” and why scientized policy

debates become so contentious (Frickel and Moore 2006:8). When civil society

organizations advocate regulatory policies for the broader social good or on behalf of

marginalized populations, they often encounter a lack of scientific knowledge to support

their position. This “undone science,” as Hess (2007; see also Prasad 1999) terms it, has

thus spurred a range of civil society organizations to solve the problem of undone science

by calling on governments to fund their research priorities, appealing directly to scientists

to shift their research agendas, collecting lay data, or hiring scientists to conduct “civil

society research” (e.g. Brown 1992; Epstein 1996; Irwin 1995; Ottinger 2010). These

efforts contribute to conflict in policy debates as civil society organizations and elites

compete to claim the epistemic jurisdiction of their preferred epistemic communities

(Kinchy 2010; McCright and Dunlap 2000).

Through this attention to the politics of scientific agenda-setting, NPSS scholars

usefully direct attention to the structural and institutional dynamics that shape how

epistemic communities influence contentious policy debates. However, this analysis

remains limited in its ability to explain the role of “international” epistemic communities

in policy contests in the global South given its focus on Western policy contexts and its

emphasis on scientists involved in basic research versus those organized in boundary

organizations such as standard-setting bodies. Given the quasi-legal status gained by

“international” standard-setting bodies under the WTO, it is critical to consider agenda-

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setting in such boundary organizations as it is likely to structure the opportunities and

constraints facing transnational firms vs. civil society organizations in policy contests in

the global South.

Epistemic Boundary Work and Epistemic Boomerangs in the Global South

A small but growing body of work has begun to extend NPSS analyses to cases in

the global South (e.g. Kinchy 2010, 2012; Hirata 2013, 2015). A particularly useful

starting point for our purposes is Abby Kinchy’s (2010) theorization of the “epistemic

boomerang.” Following Keck and Sikkink’s (1998) boomerang model of transnational

advocacy, Kinchy argues that external epistemic communities have the potential to shape

domestic policy contests in the global South on behalf of civil society organizations.

When civil society organizations are excluded from or marginalized within domestic

policymaking processes, they may choose to move beyond traditional political channels

and appeal to allies in the international community to support their social goals (Keck and

Sikkink 1998; Tarrow 2005). An epistemic boomerang emerges when civil society

organizations voice their concerns to scientists in the international community, who, in

turn, exert external pressure on the recalcitrant domestic government in the form of

scientific advice to enact policy change (Kinchy 2010). Epistemic boomerangs are made

possible at least in part because new transnational regulatory arrangements have

weakened national states’ exclusive authority to delegate epistemic jurisdiction.

Kinchy thus extends NPSS scholarship to the study of policy contexts in the

global South by analyzing the transnational political and institutional dynamics that shape

the ability of civil society organizations to influence scientific policy advice. Yet,

Kinchy’s model largely leaves epistemic communities themselves in a black box. She

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(2012:51) suggests that, in the epistemic boomerang, external epistemic communities can

wield influence in policy contests in the global South largely “through the political

authority of science and deference to experts.” While recognizing some organizational

and discursive conditions that shape the success of epistemic boomerangs, Kinchy largely

overlooks a key insight from NPSS scholarship: that epistemic communities must

conduct boundary work to establish their political authority, and that this boundary work

is shaped by broader structural and institutional dynamics.

Just as scientific agenda-setting in basic research was shaped by neoliberal

globalization, we would expect epistemic communities in standard-setting bodies and

other expert advisory committees to be influenced by these dynamics as well. In the US,

the movement to liberalize markets did not only involve removing restrictive trade

measures and orienting science towards economic competitiveness; it also involved

rolling back regulations, like those for food safety, that had been established to protect

society from the risks and harms associated with liberalization (Peck and Tickell 2002).

One strategy to this end was to challenge the state-funded science underlying these

regulations as partisan and thus biased (see Hilts 2003; Jasanoff 1990). In the postwar

period, it had been common for states to shape research agendas for regulatory science by

funding standard-setting activities directly through staff scientists and/or national

standards bodies (Higgins 2005; Higgins and Tamm Hallstrom 2007, 2008; Quark and

Lienesch 2016). In the late 1960s and 1970s, business interests pushed to separate

standard-setting organizations from regulators as they “believed that technocratic

organizations would reach scientifically conservative conclusions, or conclusions that

would be more sympathetic to business interests (especially compared to agencies and the

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courts)” (Jasanoff 1990:59). This dovetailed with the rise of the neoliberal policy

paradigm in the late 1970s and 1980s that prescribed a rollback of government

intervention in the economy. These challenges to the public funding structure for

boundary organizations created incentives for these epistemic communities to modify

their boundary work to establish their legitimacy vis-à-vis new (private) funding sources.

This, in turn, introduced new opportunities for private actors to shape research agendas

for regulatory science.

Another way in which neoliberal globalization shaped scientific agenda setting

within boundary organizations was through the introduction of new standards of

justification required for national protective regulations with the establishment of the

WTO in 1995. In what Ruggie (1982) has termed the “embedded liberalism” of the

postwar period, Western states pursued liberalization while insulating their citizens from

its costs through protective regulations. Under the neoliberal agenda at the WTO, in

contrast, member states committed to meeting new standards of legitimacy when

establishing protective regulations and when delegating epistemic jurisdiction to justify

them. For standard-setting bodies, two WTO Agreements significantly shifted the terms

on which they could claim epistemic jurisdiction: the Agreement on Sanitary and

Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement) that covers human, plant, and animal health

and the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT Agreement) that covers

technical regulations and standards, including labeling (Wirth 1994). Under these

Agreements, if national states established regulations, they needed to be the least trade-

restrictive possible, based on scientific risk assessment, and, most importantly for our

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purposes, based on “international standards” created by “international” standard-setting

bodies, when available (see WTO 1994a:article 2 and 3; WTO 1994b:article 2).

The commitment to base national regulations on “international standards” created

both new legal standards of justification for national regulations and significant legal

uncertainty regarding what constituted an “international standard” (Delimatsis 2015;

Mattli 2001; Quark 2013:134-6). The SPS Agreement gives legal primacy to the

“international standards” created by three inter-state standard-setting bodies, including

Codex for food safety. However, in the absence of such a standard, the SPS Agreement

follows the TBT Agreement in creating legal primacy for “international standards,”

vaguely defined as standards available to the public and adopted by an “international”

standard-setting body that are open to the relevant (public or private) national body from

every country (WTO 1994a:Article 3.4, Annex A, Article 3(d); WTO 1994b:Annex 3, G;

WTO 2014:XVII, B, 1, 154; see also Delimatsis 2015). In addition to these vague norms,

in 2000 the WTO TBT Committee responded to critiques that standard-setting bodies

tend to marginalize civil society, consumers, and countries in the Global South by

establishing six principles and procedures to be observed during the development of

international standards: transparency, openness, impartiality and consensus, effectiveness

and relevance, coherence, and addressing the concerns of developing countries

(Delimatsis 2015).

Although epistemic communities have always competed to some degree for

epistemic jurisdiction and the prestige and resources associated with it, we would expect

these new legal norms established by the SPS and TBT Agreements to transform the

nature of these competitive relationships (see Quark 2013:135). These new norms create

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incentives for epistemic communities to reorient their boundary work to define their

organization and their standards as “international” (see Winickoff and Mondou 2017). In

doing so, they aim to position themselves to fill the new demand for “international

standards” under WTO law.

What does this mean for the epistemic boomerang? The epistemic boomerang has

been conceptualized primarily as an additional strategy within progressive social

movements’ repertoire of contention (Kinchy 2010). However, if Western epistemic

communities reorient their boundary work towards the priorities of transnational firms

and the legal standards at the WTO, this changes our understanding of the opportunities

and constraints on social movements in the global South as they seek to use epistemic

boomerangs to influence domestic policy debates. Most critically, social movements and

firms must now articulate their policy advocacy in relation to the particular kinds of

epistemic communities privileged by the WTO. At the same time, those epistemic

communities that are best positioned to claim the ability to produce “international

standards” are Western standard-setting bodies that have greater resources, existing

international networks, and prior experience advising “international standard-setting” in

major inter-state bodies, such as Codex. These are also bodies that, to ensure their

organizational survival, are likely to have reoriented their decision-making structures

towards the priorities of Western firms in order to secure private funding with the roll-

back of public funding for boundary organizations from the 1970s to the 1990s. As such,

these standard-setting bodies are better positioned to serve as a helpmate to transnational

firms struggling to address the tensions and conflicts created by civil society

organizations and social movements than as an ally to these marginalized groups. Indeed,

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transnational firms can spur a firm-led epistemic boomerang as a means to generate

“international standards” that can claim epistemic jurisdiction in a domestic policy

context in the global South where they face resistance to their interests. This importantly

demonstrates that even scientists in Western epistemic communities that might be likely

allies for social movements in the global South—that is, epistemic communities

validating the science undergirding protective regulations—may be more oriented

towards the interests and priorities of Western firms as the push for liberalized markets

has shaped scientific boundary work.

This is not to say that the epistemic boomerang cannot be a resource for social

movements, as Kinchy (2010) suggests. To the contrary, a transnational firm-led

epistemic boomerang is often the result of successful social movement campaigns to

create financial and reputational “risks” for firms that they must manage. To the degree

that transnational firms “manage” these risks by paying for standard setting to inform

protective regulations that are stronger than those that previously existed, social

movements can claim a degree of success. That said, transnational firm-led epistemic

boomerangs also give firms control over scientific agenda setting such that resulting

standards are likely to take a different form than social movements imagined.

Neoliberal Globalization and the Shifting Boundary Work of the AOAC

To understand how the AOAC came to influence the debate over pesticide

residues in soft drinks in India, and whose interests it supported, we must first examine

how boundary work within the AOAC has changed in relation to the rise of neoliberal

globalization. The AOAC is a boundary organization with a long history of validating

methods to undergird protective regulations in the US. Indeed, in the postwar period, the

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AOAC epitomized the role of epistemic communities in underpinning what Ruggie

(1982) terms “embedded liberalism.” Epistemic communities organized in boundary

organizations like the AOAC helped to insulate civil society from the consequences of

liberalization by validating scientific data to legitimate regulations that protected society.

In the case of the AOAC, this meant validating analytical methods for the creation and

enforcement of food safety regulations by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

To establish their legitimacy—and epistemic jurisdiction—in the context of

embedded liberalism, the AOAC had conducted boundary work that constructed science

as an objective mediator in the midst of conflict among competing interest groups, such

as industry and consumers. The AOAC operated on the principle that, while industry

chemists could participate in their meetings, only chemists working for state and federal

government agencies could vote on which methods the Association would endorse for

regulatory matters in order “to ensure nonbiased selection of methods” and create a

regulatory “atmosphere free from influences other than those of purely scientific

approach” (Pohland 2009:2; Crawford 1952:37). During this time, the AOAC was largely

funded by the sales of its Official Methods of Analysis publication to federal and state

regulatory agencies and through the provision of staff time, space, and funding from the

FDA (Helrich 1984). Given its central position in relation to US regulatory agencies, the

AOAC also played a role in instantiating “embedded liberalism” on the international

stage as the US state successfully established the dominance of AOAC’s regulatory

science at Codex (see Leive 1976:491).

However, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, US firms were pushing government

policy towards trade and investment liberalization (Chorev 2007). Along with an effort to

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remove tariffs and other restrictive trade measures, industry groups and conservative

politicians began to question protective regulations, challenging the scientific advice that

legitimated them as state-funded and thus potentially subject to undue influence by

partisan concerns (Hilts 2003). Amid these conflicts, the FDA’s close relationship with

AOAC came into question. In 1970, the FDA Commissioner appointed an Ad Hoc

Science Advisory Committee to review the operations of the FDA. While recognizing the

FDA’s reliance on AOAC methods and the propriety of their work, the Committee

warned that the relationship between the FDA and AOAC could “give the appearance of

subterfuge and an interlocking directorate” (FDA 1971:52). Many AOAC staff,

committee chairs, and officers were also full-time FDA employees, and the FDA

financially supported the AOAC through staff time, office space, and equipment. The

Committee thus recommended that AOAC become “an independent, scientific society

with quarters in the private sector, staffed by salaried personnel, supplied through regular

private commercial sources” (FDA 1971:52, emphasis added). In 1979, AOAC officially

lost its public funding and became an “independent” epistemic community.

Thus, much as scientists involved in basic research were compelled to reorient

towards innovation and competitiveness at this time, so too were standard-setting bodies

like the AOAC compelled to conduct boundary work that would establish its legitimacy

in relation to industry priorities as its public funding was curtailed (see also Higgins

2005). To this end, in 1980 private firms were allowed to financially support the

Association for the first time in its history, at a level of $500 per year, and in 1987 the

Association embraced a model of full industry participation, creating a single class of

members with equal voting and participation rights (Helrich 1984:95; Pohland 2009:11-

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12). These changes significantly transformed AOAC membership. The Association’s

total number of members more than tripled from 980 in 1978 to 3,300 in 1988 (Pohland

2009:20). Moreover, while prior to 1979 most members and all of the leaders of AOAC

worked for the FDA and other regulatory agencies, by the mid-1990s, only about 20% of

AOAC members were from regulatory agencies (Pohland 2009:48).

As boundary organizations like the AOAC became more oriented towards the

needs of private firms as funders, the establishment of the WTO in 1995 created new

norms requiring national governments to grant epistemic jurisdiction to those epistemic

communities that could create “international” standards. Although the AOAC had long

participated in “international” standard-setting through its involvement in Codex, with

the establishment of the WTO, the AOAC faced heightened competition, particularly

with major “international” standard-setting bodies like the International Organization for

Standardization (ISO) (see Pohland 2009:50-51). Indeed, a biographer and former Chief

Scientific Officer described a transformation of the AOAC from a “domesticated”

organization that was closely aligned to the US state and held a “hallowed spot in the

social conscience” to a “wild” organization that “struggle[d] daily to survive in a

competitive and frequently unfriendly environment [where]…clients are not assured, and

resources are closely tied to performance” (Pohland 2009:x).

To compete in this global market for standards, in 2001 the AOAC launched a

new “business plan” that marked a clear shift in its boundary work. The business plan

reoriented the organization much more clearly towards those clients willing and able to

pay for regulatory science and towards the type of regulatory science these clients

desired: standards that would be enforceable under the WTO regime. The AOAC saw an

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opening to position itself as a key provider of regulatory science for Western firms

operating in new markets abroad. Indeed, in their marketing to firms, the Association

argued that, with the globalization of production and distribution, firms’ reputations and

their bottom lines were increasingly threatened by challenges from consumers abroad or

by different regulations in new markets. Given these risks, “companies doing business

internationally need analytical methods that are accepted worldwide to facilitate trade,”

(AOAC International 2014a). Put simply, the AOAC could help firms “Reduce Risk

Exposure to your Brand” (AOAC International 2007).

To turn this marketing into revenue, AOAC introduced a tiered membership

structure designed to allow those with the ability to pay—both private firms and

governments—to more directly set the Association’s standard-setting agenda. For an

annual fee of $10,000, firms and governments could join the top membership tier, the

Organizational Affiliate (OA) Program, and benefit from increased opportunities for

“identifying and prioritizing their method needs” within the work of the AOAC (Pohland

2009:80). By 2014, AOAC boasted 46 OAs. While this number included two Canadian

government agencies, the vast majority were private firms including instrument

manufacturers, third party certifiers, analytical testing and consulting firms, and major

transnational players in food and agricultural markets such as Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s,

Kraft, Nestlé, and Starbucks (AOAC International 2014b).

Delivering on the promise to provide regulatory science that could stand up to

litigation at the WTO, however, was more complicated. On one hand, the Association

touted its methods validation process as the “gold standard” given that it was rooted in

“over 120 years of methods validation and experience” and evidenced by the fact that

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“many AOAC methods are specifically required in the enforcement of some state,

provincial, municipal and local laws and many federal food standards worldwide”

(AOAC International 2010). Moreover, AOAC signaled its credibility under the WTO

regime by emphasizing its status as “Official Observer” in Codex since its inception and

the fact that “the majority of the analytical methods cited in Codex standards are those of

AOAC” (AOAC International 2010).

On the other hand, the WTO gave legal primacy to those organizations that

produced “international” standards, which was a challenge for the AOAC given its image

as a largely US/North American organization. As the contours of the SPS and TBT

Agreements became clear in the late 1980s, AOAC had begun to tackle this issue by

rebranding itself as AOAC International in 1991 and attempting to broaden the

transnational reach and membership of the Association by creating “sections” or chapters

of the organization in other countries. By 2010, while the majority of its members were

still US-based, the AOAC boasted that it drew its membership from more than 90

countries, working in industry, government, and academia (AOAC International 2013).

In addition to requiring an international membership, the WTO had established

vague norms for the process of decision making that would signal the “international”

status of standard-setting bodies, including openness, transparency, and consensus-

building, among others (Delimatsis 2015). To orient themselves towards these

characteristics, AOAC again engaged in boundary work to construct itself as a “third

party consensus-building body” (Pohland 2009:63). This meant marketing itself as a

disinterested mediator that could guide a process of consensus building and collaboration

through which standard methods were validated. In constructing its consensus-building

21

services, however, AOAC largely fashioned itself as a liaison that could create consensus

among regulators on behalf of transnational firms. “The advantage to the OAs,” explains

a former Chief Scientific Officer to the AOAC, “was…that AOAC could act as the nexus

between the OAs and high-level government officials” (Pohland 2009:65). When firms

faced “regulatory or trade problems,” the Association argued that it could build

consensus (defined as two-thirds majority) among “the right stakeholders,” such as

“industry, regulators, and decision makers,” by bringing them together to “discuss their

issues and needs and to identify and prioritize industry problems” (AOAC International

n.d., 2010, 2008, emphasis added). Through this boundary work, the AOAC at once

sought to assure their continued access to private funding and establish the “credibility,

defensibility, accessibility and transparency” of its standards in relation to the new norms

of legitimacy established by the WTO (Pohland 2009:63). It was with this reorientation to

both private interests and the new requirements at the WTO that the AOAC came to be

involved in the debate over pesticide residue standards in soft drinks in India.

The Firm-led Epistemic Boomerang

Throughout the debate over pesticide residue standards, the soft drink companies

had maintained that no regulatory standards were required. However, as the JPC report

made it clear that standards would be set, the soft drink giants focused on enacting a firm-

led epistemic boomerang to influence the contentious domestic policy arena. That is, they

decided to engage an “international” standard-setting body that could claim legitimate

epistemic jurisdiction over what methodologies would be used to determine the breadth

and magnitude of the standards, as well as to enforce them. For this task, the soft drink

companies turned to the AOAC to help them with their regulatory “problem” in India.

22

In 2006, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo—both AOAC Organizational Affiliates—

contracted the AOAC to solve this regulatory “problem” by initiating a “fair and

transparent process” for involving stakeholders and experts in discerning the best

methods for pesticide residue detection in soft drinks (AOAC International n.d.). AOAC

established a Presidential Task Force the same year that, as an AOAC participant

described, “was asked to develop, evaluate and validate an analytical method through the

AOAC Official Methods program that could become the Indian standard method of the

analysis for pesticide residues in soft drinks” (Bell 2007:3). The Task Force consisted of

representatives of the Indian government, industry stakeholders, expert review panelists,

and volunteer methods experts (Bell 2007). While the AOAC claimed to bring together

the key stakeholders needed to generate the consensus required of a legitimate

“international standard,” strikingly missing from the list of stakeholders was CSE.

At the Task Force’s first meeting at AOAC’s 2006 Annual Meetings in

Minneapolis, AOAC representatives actively sought to set the Task Force’s agenda. As

an AOAC participant described, “AOAC quickly impressed upon their Indian colleagues

the need for validated methods to resolve the problem, discussed the analytical needs in

terms of appropriate matrixes, specific analytes, analytical ranges, lower limits of

detection; and the logical future course of action” (Pohland 2009:81-82). With agreement

from the Indian government participants to move forward with a methods validation

process, the AOAC put into motion its Official Methods process. This first required the

appointment of an Expert Review Panel (ERP), which included four representatives from

the Indian government and six pesticide experts from AOAC (Bell 2007:3; Pohland

2009:82). The ERP then met during the second Task Force meeting, held in December in

23

New Delhi, to come to a consensus on the fit-for-purpose statement and performance

criteria that a method must meet in the validation process to successfully achieve Official

Methods status (Pohland 2009). As an AOAC participant explained at the time, the

second meeting was convened “with the intention of helping to bring India’s government

stakeholders to a consensus on methods” (Bell 2007:3).

After determining the fit-for-purpose statement and performance criteria, AOAC

procedures require the organization to issue a call for methods, broadcast widely among

its members and stakeholders, for the ERP to consider (Pohland 2009:87). PepsiCo had

taken steps to prepare for this call for methods in order to influence which methods

would achieve Official Methods status. In order to be designated an “Official Method” of

the AOAC, a methodology must be validated first by single-laboratory validation and

then through a collaborative validation conducted by multiple laboratories in order to

verify that a method is rugged enough for use in regulatory testing (Pohland 2009).

Methods with more validation data available tend to be given preference by ERPs. Thus,

PepsiCo contracted Covance Laboratories, a private lab in Wisconsin, to conduct single-

laboratory validation of their two preferred methods for the detection of fat-soluble and

water-soluble pesticide residues in soft drinks (Paske et al. 2007a,b). Once complete,

these methods were submitted to the ERP for consideration for collaborative study

(Wong 2008).

When the ERP met again in New Delhi in February of 2007, it considered 14

potential methods applicable to 29 different potential pesticide residues in soft drinks. Of

the 14, the two methods submitted by PepsiCo/Covance were chosen, and Covance

Laboratories was contracted to coordinate the collaborative studies of the two methods in

24

cooperation with a PepsiCo scientist (Pohland 2009; Miller and Milne 2008a,b). The

collaborative studies involved 9 government and private labs, 6 in the US and 1 in each

Canada, India, and Europe (Miller and Milne 2008a,b). Based on the results of these

collaborative studies, the two analytical methods commissioned by PepsiCo were granted

Official Method status by the AOAC in 2007 and 2008 (AOAC International 2008).

AOAC hailed the process a success. As an AOAC representative wrote, “in light of the

continuing controversy in India over pesticides in soft drinks, where the performance of

analytical methods is a central part of the discussion, the AOAC has helped to forge the

process for an international consensus for the determination of pesticide residues” (Bell

2007:3, emphasis added).

The companies then touted these methods as the relevant “international standards”

that should be adopted by the Indian government in accordance with the WTO regime. In

a press release, PepsiCo emphasized the validity of the “accredited, internationally-

recognized” methods approved through the AOAC, as well as the organization’s

credentials as an association with “official observer status in Codex Alimentarius”

(PepsiCo 2006). The firm emphasized that AOAC’s “methods are recognized at the

highest level in the world and thus generally are the methods of choice by many

governments around the world” (PepsiCo 2006). In short, the firms argued that these

were the “international standards” on which Indian regulation should be based.

On June 17, 2009, almost six years after the CSE study, the Indian Ministry of

Health and Family Welfare released official standards for pesticide residues in soft drinks

based on the standard methodologies endorsed by the AOAC International (Gazette of

India 2009). As mentioned above, these standards represented a victory for CSE as

25

relatively strict standards were set where very weak to non-existent standards previously

existed. CSE’s advocacy successfully generated enough pressure on transnational firms

to compel them to fund an epistemic boomerang to generate the science to underpin

protective regulations. At the same time, however, the standards reflected the ability of

transnational firms to maneuver within WTO norms to draw on “international” standard-

setting bodies to press their interests. As the AOAC explained, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola

turned to the AOAC not to simply solve a scientific question but rather “to help opposing

sides resolve the complex issues, which included lack of standard analytical methodology,

politics, and international trade” (AOAC International 2013). In comparison with the

standards recommended by CSE and the Bureau of Indian Standards, the official

standards were ten times more lenient, regulated half as many pesticides, and did not

establish a multiple residue limit (compare The Gazette of India 2009 and JPC 2004).

Conclusion

Growing attention has focused on the rise of international standard-setting bodies

and their importance for both international standards and domestic regulations (Büthe and

Mattli 2011; Higgins and Tamm Hallström 2007, 2008; Loconto and Busch 2010; Tamm

Hallström 2004). Yet few analyses of this phenomenon have been attentive to the

structural and institutional power dynamics that shape agenda setting within international

standard-setting bodies and their influence on domestic policy contests (but see Büthe

and Mattli 2011). In this paper, I have sought to extend the literature on the new political

sociology of science in order to explore how international standard-setting bodies

construct legitimate epistemic jurisdiction transnationally and specifically in domestic

policy contests in the global South. In doing so, I demonstrate the structural and

26

institutional biases that privilege transnational firms in agenda setting in international

standard-setting bodies and thus in shaping the “international standards” mandated by the

WTO regime as the basis for domestic regulations.

These findings build on and complicate Kinchy’s (2010) concept of the epistemic

boomerang and the long-standing finding in the social movement literature that NGOs

can use transnational norms to influence domestic policy debates (Keck and Sikkink

1998). The WTO regime legitimates claims that transnational norms are relevant to

national policy making. Indeed, CSE was successful in demanding attention to EU

standards in the Indian policy debate and, ultimately, in compelling transnational firms to

fund an epistemic boomerang that provided the scientific rationale for stricter standards

than previously existed. At the same time, however, the WTO regime narrowly specifies

what kinds of transnational norms/standards will be accepted as legitimate. While norms

prioritizing “consensus-based,” “international” standards aim to minimize the ability of

more powerful actors to dominate standard setting, the broader neoliberal policy turn

renders these efforts ineffective. With the loss of state funding, epistemic communities

have become increasingly dependent on transnational firms to fund their work and WTO

standards of legitimacy turn a blind eye to such structural inequalities. This reflects

Moore et al.’s (2011:21) observation that new forms of “stakeholder governance” and

“consensus-decision-making” can shift political decision making from official

government bodies to extra-governmental bodies of stakeholders that are less democratic

and accountable. Moreover, the role played by AOAC reflects what Djama et al. (2011)

see as the rise of “managerialism” in standard-setting, in which consensus building is

used as a technology to neutralize conflicts and depoliticize standards.

27

This case further builds on recent work exploring how experts’ pursuit of

professional status intersects with broader processes of economic, political, legal, and

cultural globalization (Dezalay and Garth 1995, 1996; Halliday and Carruthers 2009;

Shaffer 2015; Tamm Hallström 2004). Scholars in this vein have given attention to

professionals’ efforts to construct their legitimacy and authority transnationally. My

analysis emphasizes the structural and institutional dynamics that shape these

professional pursuits. I demonstrate how broader shifts in the organization of the

economy compel epistemic communities to reorient their boundary work in order to

maintain legitimacy and financial support for their work and, in doing so, position them

as more likely to conduct policy advocacy on behalf of transnational firms than civil

society organizations. While Kinchy (2010) notes that scientists risk undermining their

credibility when they move into advocacy roles, my findings demonstrate that this

depends on the embeddedness of the scientists in broader networks of power, prestige and

“international” institutional configurations that can shield them from these attacks to their

credibility.

Author Biography

Amy A. Quark is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William & Mary. She has

authored an award-winning book, Global Rivalries: Standards Wars and the

Transnational Cotton Trade, and numerous articles on transnational governance and

global inequalities.

Acknowledgements

28

I would like to thank Virginia Jenkins, Brandon Lardy, Rachel Lienesch, Margaret (Tera)

Morris, and Emily Walker for research assistance and Brent Kaup and the anonymous

reviewers for comments on the manuscript. Responsibility for the content is my own.

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