(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”的监管和管理方法进行管理。基于风险的治理不是寻求消除所有潜在的不利结果，而是根据对风险可能性和后果的正式评估，界定可接受的风险水平，然后按照明确界定的原则，将控制工作重点放在被视为不可接受的风险上。这种基于风险的方法首先在环境健康和安全领域发展起来，现在已经普及，特别是在盎格鲁-撒克逊国家，现在正在国际上推广，作为政策制定和实施的普遍原则，有望以更有效和合理的方式组织治理活动，并对其局限性和潜在的失败进行解释。然而，基于风险的方法体现了对国家应如何界定和解释不利的治理结果以及治理失败和成功的真正含义的特别理解。这种事先基于风险的治理限度合理化可能与固有的治理传统、规范和问责结构相冲突，也可能与根深蒂固的社会价值观和对如何管理不利结果的期望相冲突，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制度因素，HowSAFE使用了一个比较案例研究设计，重点关注六个政策领域：职业健康与安全，洪水，食品安全，医疗保健，刑事司法和教育，以及四个国家：法国，德国，荷兰和英国，以追求三个密切相关的目标：1） 记录欧洲政策领域和国家背景下基于风险的治理的程度和传播过程;2） 在政策领域内和政策领域之间，将基于风险的工具的设计、调整和实际应用与不同的治理活动和职能进行比较; 第三章 使用该比较数据集来解释驱动、塑造和限制欧洲基于风险的治理的制度因素，并在此过程中更广泛地反映国家如何解释失败和治理的局限性。

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.