Improving government policy on risk: Eight key principles

Terje Aven and Ortwin Renn

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2018, vol. 176, issue C, 230-241

Abstract: This paper discusses the basic principles that a government should adopt when it comes to risk. There seems to be broad agreement about general principles, such as openness and transparency, involvement, proportionality and consistency, and making decisions based on evidence, but when it comes to a more detailed level, suitable principles are missing or are inconsistent. For example, what does it mean to base decisions on evidence or to act with proportionality when regulating or managing risk? The present paper aims at stimulating a discussion on this topic by formulating eight specific principles that governments should apply for the effective treatment of risk in society. The authors consider these eight principles to reflect current scientific knowledge produced by the risk analysis field, but like all principles of this type they are grounded in normative requirements of “good†governance. Several examples are used to illustrate the discussion.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832017305185
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:176:y:2018:i:c:p:230-241

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2018.04.018

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().