(HowSAFE): How States Account for Failure in Europe: Risk and the Limits of Governance

环境保护、医疗保健、工作场所安全、食品、刑事司法和教育有什么共同之处？这些不同的政策领域越来越多地通过基于风险的监管和管理办法进行管理。基于风险的治理不是寻求消除所有潜在的不利后果，而是在对风险的可能性和后果进行正式评估的基础上，界定可接受的风险水平，然后按照明确界定的原则，将控制努力集中在那些被认为不可接受的风险上。这种基于风险的方法最初是在环境健康和安全领域发展起来的，现已变得无处不在，尤其是在盎格鲁-撒克逊国家，现在正作为政策制定和实施的一项普遍原则在国际上推广，有望以一种更高效、更合理的方式组织治理活动，并考虑到这些活动的局限性和潜在失败。然而，基于风险的方法体现了对国家应如何定义和解释不利治理结果的具体理解，以及实际上治理失败和成功的真正含义。这种事前基于风险的治理限度合理化可能与根深蒂固的治理传统、规范和问责结构相冲突，并与根深蒂固的社会价值观和关于应如何管理不利后果的期望相冲突，这些价值观和期望因国家和政策领域而异。为了了解影响基于风险的治理的传播和采用的体制因素，HowSAFE采用了比较案例研究设计，重点关注六个政策领域[职业健康与安全、洪灾、食品安全、医疗保健、刑事司法和教育]和四个国家(法国、德国、荷兰和英国)，以追求三个密切相关的目标：1)记录基于风险的治理在欧洲政策领域和国家环境中的程度和扩散过程；2)比较基于风险的工具在政策领域内和政策领域之间不同治理活动和职能的设计、适应和实际应用；3)使用该比较数据集来解释推动、塑造和制约欧洲基于风险的治理的制度因素，并在这样做的过程中更广泛地反映国家如何为失败和治理的局限性负责。

What do environmental protection, health care, workplace safety, food, criminal justice, and education share in common? These diverse policy domains are increasingly governed through ¿risk-based¿ approaches to regulation and management. Rather than seeking to eliminate all potential adverse outcomes, risk-based governance involves defining acceptable levels of risk, based on formal assessments of their probability and consequences, and then focusing control efforts on those risks deemed unacceptable following clearly defined principles. First developed in the fields of environmental health and safety, this risk-based approach has become pervasive, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries, and is now being promoted internationally as a universal principle for policymaking and implementation, promising a more efficient and rational means of organising governance activities and accounting for their limits and potential failures. However, risk-based approaches embody particular understandings about how the State should define, and account for, adverse governance outcomes and, indeed, the very meaning of governance ¿failure¿ and ¿success¿. Such ex ante risk-based rationalisations of the limits of governance may conflict with embedded governance traditions, norms, and accountability structures, as well as with deeply held societal values and expectations about how adverse outcomes should be managed, which vary both across countries and policy domains. To understand the institutional factors shaping the spread and adoption of risk-based governance, HowSAFE uses a comparative case study design focusing on six policy domains¿occupational health & safety, flooding, food safety, health care, criminal justice, and education¿and four countries¿France, Germany, the Netherlands, and UK¿to pursue three closely related objectives:1) To document the extent, and diffusion processes, of risk-based governance across policy domains and national settings in Europe;2) To compare the design, adaptation and practical application of risk-based instruments to different governance activities and functions, within and between policy domains; 3) To use that comparative dataset to explain the institutional factors driving, shaping, and constraining risk-based governance in Europe, and in so doing reflect more broadly on how states account for failure and the limits of governance.