300148 Risk based Regulation. Case studies across Europe (S) (WiSe 2014/2015)

What do environmental protection, workplace safety, food, health care, criminal justice, and education all have in common? All these policy domains can – indeed, according to some should – be governed through what are known as ‘risk-based’ approaches to regulation and management (OECD 2010). From this perspective, the objective of governance is not to eliminate all potential adverse outcomes, but to define acceptable levels of risk, based on assessments of their probability and impact, and then to focus control efforts on those risks deemed unacceptable following clearly defined principles. As such, risk-based approaches promise more efficient, rational and universally applicable means of organising, and accounting for, governance activities.
Risk-based approaches have been advocated or mandated by international organizations, such as the OECD, WTO and EU, as global instruments of ‘better regulation’ and free-trade. There are, however, good reasons to expect that this general principle of governance may not be accepted universally. Comparative risk governance research, for example, has identified numerous political and cultural factors leading to inconsistency across policy domains and countries in the governance of particular hazards, such as natural and artificial sources of radiation or chemicals Moreover, recent research suggests that the very concept of ‘risk’ itself may have only limited ‘fit’ across policy domain and country contexts (Rothstein, Borraz and Huber 2011). Risk-based approaches embody particular understandings about how the State should define, and account for, adverse governance outcomes and, indeed, the very meaning of governance ‘failure’ and ‘success’. This seminar aims to reconstruct a comparative investigation of the factors shaping the spread and adoption of risk-based approaches to governance across case studies in some European countries.

Bibliography

Suggested reading

Rothstein, H. Borraz O. & Huber, M. (2013) Risk and the Limits of Governance: Exploring varied patterns of risk-based governance across Europe. Regulation and Governance 7 (2); 215-235