La participación y la transparencia en los procesos decisorios de los actores privados transnacionales. Casos empíricos en los sectores de la seguridad alimentaria, de la política ambiental global y de la regulación farmaceútica y de los dispositivos médicos

Resumen

This doctoral thesis focuses on certain private actors that operate transnationally in fields relevant to administrative law, such as food security, environmental protection, pharmaceuticals and medical device regulation. We are only interested in some of the activities carried out by these private actors, concretely those which have an effect that we have termed “regulatory impact”. In this work, we use the term “regulatory” as a meta-juridical concept, in order to understand the capacity that characterizes the activities of our transnational private actors to influence the final recipients in the respective fields. These activities do not result in the coercive imposition of a certain behaviour or an obligation on recipients (whether public or private subjects). Instead, they materialise through a series of varied acts with a flexible nature and a non-binding nature (e.g. technical norms or private standards, guidelines, recommendations or other instruments). However, these activities have considerable multiplier effects on the analysed fields as a consequence of their possible impact (in particular, on the protection of certain fundamental rights recognised at an European level). This makes their study from a legal-administrative perspective all the more relevant. In our view, the branch of administrative law is perhaps the most experienced in this matter. In particular, administrative doctrine has shown the greatest interest in understanding how far certain private actors may intervene in the regulatory chain in a way that is analogous or parallel –and not substitutive– to that of the Public Administration itself in these or other comparable fields. Depending on the case studies, administrative law can be a tool for finding out and understanding how our private legal actors operate transnationally and how they carry out their activities. Likewise, many of the internal rules and codes of conduct that make up the internal policy of our private actors contain procedural criteria or practices. These rules include some of the cultural values of administrative law, particularly participation and transparency. These criteria or practices have a certain similarity to those typically procedural principles of a legal-administrative nature that govern the activity of the Public Administration. The participation and transparency function as “strategies” which, in certain cases, set out to substantiate said activities of some private actors, in order to put in place harmonized and more efficient instruments in the various sectors in which they operate. On the one hand, with the incorporation of the practice of participation, some private actors recognize multiple subjects and stakeholders the opportunity to take part in the regulatory task, in order to give voice to their claims and deliberate collectively. On the other, sometimes the practice of transparency allows the global community to know and understand how these private actors carry out their activities. As a basis, we rely on extant studies in administrative doctrine pertaining to associated matters and fields. We intend to address, in this context and from a subjective viewpoint, the meaning of such practices and criteria and how they operate within the structural framework of transnational private actors.