This book evaluates and compares risk regulation and safety management for offshore oil and gas operations in the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and Australia. It provides an interdisciplinary approach with legal, technological, and sociological perspectives on their efforts to assess and prevent major accidents and improve safety performance offshore. Presented in three parts, the volume begins with a review of the technical, legal, behavioral, and sociological factors involved in designing, implementing, and enforcing a regulatory regime for industrial safety. It then evaluates the four regulatory regimes that encompass the cultural, legal, and other contextual factors that influence their design and implementation, along with their reliance on industrial expertise and standards and the use of performance indicators. The final section presents an assessment of the resilience of the Norwegian regime and its capacity to keep pace with new technologies and emerging risks, respond to near miss incidents, encourage safety culture, incorporate vested rights of labor, and perform inspection and self-audit functions. This book is highly relevant for those in government, business, academia, and elsewhere in civil society who are involved in offshore safety issues, including regulatory authorities and industrial safety professionals.

"This book evaluates and compares risk regulation and safety management for offshore oil and gas operations in the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and Australia. It provides an interdisciplinary approach with legal, technological, and sociological perspectives on their efforts to assess and prevent major accidents and improve safety performance offshore. Presented in three parts, the volume begins with a review of the technical, legal, behavioral, and sociological factors involved in designing, implementing, and enforcing a regulatory regime for industrial safety. It then evaluates the four regulatory regimes that encompass the cultural, legal, and other contextual factors that influence their design and implementation, along with their reliance on industrial expertise and standards and the use of performance indicators. The final section presents an assessment of the resilience of the Norwegian regime and its capacity to keep pace with new technologies and emerging risks, respond to near miss incidents, encourage safety culture, incorporate vested rights of labor, and perform inspection and self-audit functions. This book is highly relevant for those in government, business, academia, and elsewhere in civil society who are involved in offshore safety issues, including regulatory authorities and industrial safety professionals."--Publisher's website.

This book presents a risk management framework designed to achieve better decisions and more desirable outcomes. It presents an in-depth discussion of some fundamental principles of risk management related to the use of expected values, uncertainty handling, and risk acceptance criteria. Several examples from the offshore petroleum industry are included to illustrate the use of the framework, but it can also be applied in other areas.

Global energy problems will remain a challenge in the coming decades. The impact of climate change and the melting of polar sea ice opening up access to offshore hydrocarbon resources in the Arctic Ocean, raises questions for both civil society and the scientific community over drilling opportunities in Arctic marine areas. Disparities in approach to the governance of oil and gas extraction in the Arctic arise from fundamental differences in histories, cultures, domestic constraints and substantive values and attitudes in the Arctic coastal states and sub-states. Differing political systems, legal traditions and societal beliefs with regard to energy security and economic development, environmental protection, legitimacy of decision making, and the ownership and respect of the rights of indigenous people, all affect how governance systems of oil and gas extraction are designed. Using a multidisciplinary approach and case studies from the USA, Norway, Russia, Canada, Greenland/Denmark and the EU, this book both examines the current governance of extraction and its effects and considers ways to enhance the efficiency of environmental management and public participation in this system.

This multi-disciplinary book conceptualizes, maps, and analyses ongoing standardization processes of risk issues across various sectors, processes, and practices. Standards are not only technical specifications and guidelines to support efficient risk governance, but also contain social, political, economic, and organizational aspects. This book presents a variety of standardization processes and applications of standards that may influence our judgements of risk, the organizing of risk governance, and, accordingly, our behaviour. Standardization and standards can impact risk governance in different ways. The most important lessons drawn from the present volume can be summarized in three areas: (1) how standardization might impact on power relations and interests; (2) how standardization may change flexibility in decision-making, communication, and cooperation; and (3) how standardization could (re)direct attention and risk perception. The volume’s aim is to present an analysis of standardization processes and how it affects our thinking about risk, how we organize risk governance, and how standardization may influence risk management. In so doing, it contributes to a more informed discourse regarding the use of standards and standardization in contemporary risk management. Standardization and Risk Governance will be of great interest to students of risk, standardization, global governance, and critical security studies.