300240 Risk and the Limits of Governance (S) (SoSe 2013)

Risk-based approaches to governance are widely promoted as universally applicable foundations for improving the quality, efficiency, and rationality of governance across policy domains. Premised on the idea that governance cannot eliminate all adverse outcomes, these approaches provide a method for establishing priorities and allocating scarce resources, and, in so doing, rationalise the limits of what governance interventions can, and should, achieve. Yet cursory observation suggests that risk-based approaches have spread unevenly across countries.

The seminar provides an overview over risk based regulation and focuses the discussion by comparing the ways in which, and why, such approaches have “colonised” governance regimes in the UK. The main focus is on the institutionally patterned adoption of risk-based governance across European countries in a number of policy domains.

Bibliography

Rothstein, H., Borraz, O., and Huber, M. (2012) ‘Risk and The Limits of Governance: Exploring Varied Patterns of Risk-Based Governance across Europe’, Regulation and Governance, 6(4): 1-21