This book provides an easy, but comprehensive and rigorous access to the main concepts, terminology, methods and procedures of risk analysis intended for all those involved in the EU policy and regulatory decision making on risks. It establishes a common ground of knowledge which enables a more informed dialogue on risks, a closer collaboration between decision makers and scientists and a better appraisal of the potential and limits of risk science. The book also brings together in an accessible way much multidisciplinary knowledge which had been dispersed over many technical documents and specialist books. The EU is in the front line of health, safety and environmental risk management. GMOs, food safety, hazardous chemicals, climate change, radiation hazards, are just a few of the popular risk issues addressed by the EU through policy and regulatory measures. The risk analysis paradigm, including risk assessment, management and communication has been at the core of the EU decision making for a long time already. EU Institutions strive for a science-based approach to risk management. Nevertheless, the dialogue and collaboration on risk issues between policy makers, stakeholders and scientists are still difficult and the potential and limits of science in support of decision making, as well as the basic concepts of risk analysis are not fully understood outside the narrow specialist circles.

This publication presents recent OECD papers on risk and regulatory policy. They offer measures for developing, or improving, coherent risk governance policies.

Laws and regulations affect the daily lives of businesses and citizens. High-quality laws promote national welfare and growth, while badly designed laws hinder growth, harm the environment and put the health of citizens at risk. This report analyses practices to improve the quality of laws ...

This book sets out a novel conceptual and analytical framework to explain why risk analysis, cost-benefit analysis, and similar analytical tools have gained sizeable currency in public administrations, in comparative perspective. Situated in critical interpretive policy analysis methodology, the book systematizes and innovates respective debates in three ways. First, it develops a novel typology of actors’ appreciations of analytical tools as instrumental problem-solving, legitimacy-seeking, and power-seeking. It conceptualizes the latter two as "polity policies" with actors seeking to confirm or rework decision-making structures. Second, the book theorizes how executive fragmentation and the multiplication of coordination requirements – often treated as hindrances to substantial analytical turns in an administration – nourish actors’ ideal typical appreciations of analytical tools in distinct ways. Lastly, it scrutinizes varieties of risk analysis across three risk-heavy policy domains in Germany (including the EU) and discusses the potential of risk analysis to stabilize or transform decision-making in multi-level settings. This book will be of key interest to policy analysts and risk analysts, and scholars of European politics, comparative politics, policy studies, public administration, multi-level governance, EU studies, risk analysis, policy evaluation, and the political sociology of quantification.

Separation of powers is the time-tested touchstone of the legitimate exercise of power in modern democracies. This collection examines decision-making in the EU's multilayered and polycentric constitutional structure through this lens. The focus on separation of powers reveals how strong executive powers collaborate in the EU as a single source of public power, which is not sufficiently counterbalanced by parliaments or the judiciary. The collection explores 3 policy fields marked by crisis: the economic and monetary union (EMU), migration, and trade. Drawing on expertise from across these sectors, with a strong conceptual thread linking all the contributions, this important work illustrates how different branches of government co-determine each others' powers.

This book examines the role of trust in public life. It seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of certain fundamental concepts in political and legal theory, such as the concepts of authority, power, social practice, the rule of law, and justice by furnishing and sharpening our concepts of trust and trustworthiness. Bringing together contributors from across the social, cognitive, historical, and political sciences, the book opens up inquiries into central concepts in legal theory as well as new approaches and methodologies. The interdisciplinary contributions analyse the notions of trust, trustworthiness, and distrust and apply them to address a variety of problems and questions.

A vast and diverse body of EU law addresses an enormous range of environmental matters. This book examines a number of areas of substantive EU environmental law, focusing on the striking preoccupation of EU environmental law with the structure of decision-making. It highlights the observation that environmental protection and environmental decision-making depend intimately on both detailed, specialised information about the physical state of the world, and on political judgments about values and priorities. It also explores the elaborate mechanisms that attempt to bring these distinctive decision-making resources into EU environmental law in areas including industrial pollution, chemicals regulation, environmental assessment and climate change.