Summary the government of risk
Understanding risk regulating regimes
By Christopher Hood, Henry Rothstein, and Robert Baldwin
ISBN 9780199270019
1
,Index
I. Introducing risk regulation regime ........................................................................................................ 3
1. What are risk regulation regimes? Why do they matter? .................................................................... 3
2. The comparative anatomy of risk regulation regimes ......................................................................... 6
3. Nine risk regulation regimes compared ............................................................................................ 10
II. Explaining variation in risk regulation regimes .................................................................................. 12
4. How far does context shape content in risk regulation regimes? .................................................... 12
5. Exploring the ‘market failure’ hypothesis .......................................................................................... 15
6. Opinion-responsive government and risk regulation ........................................................................ 19
7. Interests, lobbies, and experts .......................................................................................................... 22
8. Regime content and context revisited: an overall picture ................................................................. 25
III. Exploring the dynamics of risk regulation regimes .......................................................................... 27
9. Regime development under Pressure: staged retreats and lateral mutations? ................................ 27
10. The regime perspective in risk regulation: implications for policy and institutional design ............. 30
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,I. Introducing risk regulation regime
1. What are risk regulation regimes? Why do they matter?
1. From risk society to variety in risk regulation regimes
This book examines the regulation of risk:
- Risk definition: the book defines risk as governmental interference with market or social
processes to control potential adverse consequences to health.
- Goal of the book:
o It seeks to describe, compare, and explain variation in the way risks are handled by
the state
o It sets out to show how overarching theories of risk and its management need to be
modified or supplemented to account for detailed variations in risk regulation regimes.
We live in in a ‘risk society’ and a ‘regulatory state’
Risk society (Beck 1992)
Many overarching approaches to risk and its management have been developed over the past two
decades. Perhaps the best known is the work of Ulrich Beck:
- According to Beck and others, we live today in a ‘risk society’. By that Beck means that risk
has a different significance for everyday life from that applying in previous historical eras.
- Causes of risks according to Beck coming from advanced societies:
o Human activity and technology produces as a side-effect risks that need specialized
expertise to assess and recognize, are collective, global, and irreversible in their
impact, and thus potentially catastrophic on a scale never seen before
o The risks associated with genetically modified organisms, reproductive technology, or
computer failures that also potentially impact on a wide range of everyday human life
o The risks of ‘adventure tourism’ by holidaymakers from the affluent world
o The possible risks from mobile phones suggested by—conflicting—reports on their
alleged addictiveness, effect on memory, role in brain tumors and dementia, and
contribution to road accident deaths
Regulatory state (Majone 1994)
The idea of the ‘regulatory state’ is that a new institutional and policy style has emerged, in which
government's role as regulator advances while its role as a direct employer or property-owner may
decline through privatization and bureaucratic downsizing.
- Regulatory state can be linked with risk society because risk and safety is often held to be
one of the major drivers of contemporary regulatory growth (e.g. EU regulation)
- Development of risk regulation is interpreted by many to reflect broader political and cultural
change.
o Douglas sees risk as a political weapon used by a society poised between the
cultures of individualism and egalitarianism, to blame those who wield power in the
state and big corporations for what happens to the rest of us. From this perspective
the increased salience of risk and regulation reflects a cultural shift away from
‘hierarchist’ world-views over matters of trust and blame
o Power sees the development of an ‘audit society’ in the UK and other states, which
responds to risk and regulatory failure by ‘greater investment in formal, generalizable
systems of control rather than by developing nonstandard capabilities for acting on
informal sources of intelligence’. The argument is that patterns observable in the
financial world, where more elaborate and formal audit systems are adopted after
every collapse to offer greater ‘assurance’ about system robustness, are developing
in many other domains of social life.
Such macroscopic and world-historical perspectives on risk and its management may have their uses.
But most indicate substantial variety in the way risks and them do not explain, or even describe,
variety within the putative ‘regulatory state’, ‘risk society’ or ‘audit society’. Yet casual observation,
academic inquiry, hazards are handled by the state.
- Across the affluent democracies, with which those writing about ‘risk society’ and ‘regulatory
state’ are mainly concerned, substantial variation can be observed in the particular risks and
hazards that are chosen for regulation and the way regulation works.
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, - Variations in the ways risks and hazards are handled across policy domains within the same
country. Indeed, it often happens that there is a strong international exchange of knowledge,
views, and cultures within particular risk domains, such as chemicals, and air and sea
transport, but very little cross-domain exchange within states (Breyer 1993)
o The result is a policy and intellectual ‘archipelago’ of risk domains isolated from one
another, with very different policy stances across the various domains.
- Risk tolerances may vary as well as anticipation and intrusiveness in regulation.
- Some of the variations we can observe across risk regulation domains involve different
approaches to standard-setting.
- The design of institutional machinery and boundaries for risk regulation also varies sharply
from one domain to another:
o Some risks and hazards are handled by ‘risk bureaucracies’, in the sense of state
agencies staffed by specialists in risk management with expert monitoring
arrangements and dedicated specialist enforcers.
o Others are regulated by more generalist agencies, self-regulatory arrangements, or
the law courts and may rely on lay reporting about hazards rather than specialized
monitoring
o In some cases, one agency or bureaucracy monopolizes an entire risk domain, while
in others the domain is divided up among a multiplicity of players for different stages
or aspects of the regulatory task, amounting to a control system made up of multiple
regimes, or at least sub-regimes
2. The idea of risk regulation regimes
Regime: the complex of institutional geography, rules, practice, and animating ideas that are
associated with the regulation of a particular risk or hazard.
- Institutional geography variations:
o Scale (from international through national to local jurisdiction)
o Integration (from a single agency handling all features of regulation to highly
fragmented administration and complex overlapping systems controlling related
aspects of a risk)
o Specialization ( from risk-specific and hazard-specific expertise to general-purpose
administration.
- Rules variations:
o Formality (from unwritten club rules to statutory codes)
o Targets (from affecting inputs to processes and products)
o Penalty or incentive structures (from moral exhortation to criminalizing certain types
of activity)
- Practice and animating ideas variations:
o Professional or cultural bias (for instance in reliance on professional or lay reporting
of hazards)
o Rigour
o Preferred policy instruments
▪ E.g. a bias towards public education and dialogue
▪ E.g. a bias towards market-type incentives like grants or taxes
▪ E.g. a bias towards command-and-control modes of operation.
Three basic features of the regime approach:
1. Risk regulation regimes are systems: sets of interacting or at least related parts rather than as
‘single-cell’ phenomena.
2. Risk regulation regimes are entities that have some degree of continuity over time
3. Risk regimes are conceived as relatively bounded systems that can be specified at different
levels of breadth
3. Potential payoffs of a risk regulation regime perspective
A risk regulation regime-centered approach to looking at the social handling of risk and hazard is
intended to be a ‘middle way’ approach to institutional analysis
- It is designed to capture the variety that is left out of macroscopic ‘risk society’ or ‘audit
society’ approaches, which inevitably can deal only in broad-gauge interpretation.
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