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

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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.