Understanding risk and regulatory reform

ABSTRACT

There are few areas in regulation likely to cause more controversy than where risk, science and politics collide. While the case of Thalidomide shows that it is by no means an exclusively recent concern, David Vogel’s work confirms that it is an enduring theme of contemporary debate. Vogel has maintained that, while the American regulatory regime of the 1960s and 1970s may have been intensely contested, its European counterpart now displays significant similarities, so that the “Tortoise has now caught up with the Hare”. This article challenges such a view, suggesting that he has overstated the role of Precaution in European regulation, where it is qualified by other regulatory principles (BATNEEC, Proportionality and Subsidiarity) that embrace other socially valued objectives: economic growth, technological innovation and employment. Moreover, while the rhetoric of European regulation may evoke a concern with the role of science in regulation (often at the cutting edge, where precaution demands the evidentiary bar to intervention is lowered) in practise, its role (through risk assessments) has ensured that it is elevated.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk
• science
• precaution
• regulation
• reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

George Taylor is a Lecturer in Politics.

Notes

1 BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) is a progressive neurological disorder that damages the central nervous system. It is not well understood how this prion infection transmits to humans, but research suggests that the first probable infections occurred during the 1970s with two cases of BSE being identified in 1986. It is thought that it originated as a result of feeding cattle meat-and-bone meal that contained BSE-infected products from a spontaneously occurring case of BSE and was spread in cattle industry by feeding rendered, prion-infected, bovine meat-and-bone meal to young calves.

2 The Politics of Precaution was awarded the ‘best book’ prize by the Organizations and the Natural Environment Division, Academy of Management, 2012 and the Charles H. Levine Memorial Book Prize, International Political Science Association, 2013.

3 This is an area of regulation that the author is currently researching upon. The intention is to submit a longer, more considered view of developments that have taken place over the last three decades on genetic modification in the respective regulatory regimes.