Citation

Ansell C, Baur P. Risk Hazards Crisis Public Policy 2018; 9(4): 397-430.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Policy Studies Organization or the authors, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/rhc3.12153

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Profound changes in risk regulation have been brewing over the last few decades. These changes include an explosion of new institutional forms and strategies that decenter risk regulation and introduce a role for meta-regulation, a growing reliance on risk-based analysis to organize decision making and management, an increasingly preventive approach to regulation that requires an expansion of surveillance to better characterize and monitor risks, and a sharpening of contestation over strategies for evaluating and responding to risk. We distill two perspectives from the existing literature on risk regulation that can plausibly provide overarching explanations for these trends. The first perspective explains these trends as a reflection of the refashioning of state, market, and society to privilege economic liberty--an explanatory framework we call "neoliberal governmentality." The second perspective argues that these trends reflect practical demands for more efficient and effective risk regulation and management--an explanatory framework we refer to as "functional adaptation." The central purpose of this paper is to advance a third explanation that we call a "problem definition and control" approach. It argues that trends in risk regulation reflect interactions between how society defines risks and how regulatory regimes seek to control those risks.

Language: en

Keywords

percepción de riesgos; política y gestión de riesgos; risk perception; risk policy and management; 风险政策与管理; 风险认知