Performance‐based design, expertise asymmetry, and professionalism: Fire safety regulation in the neoliberal era

Graham Spinardi

Regulation & Governance, 2019, vol. 13, issue 4, 520-539

Abstract: Fire safety has traditionally been regulated by prescriptive rules that stipulate requirements according to the type and size of a building, with the regulator's job being to check that these rules have been followed. However, many jurisdictions now allow performance‐based design regulation in which approval depends on the regulator assessing the prospective performance of a bespoke fire safety design for a particular project. Regulators thus need to be able to adjudicate on the knowledge claims put forward by fire safety engineers, but most regulators lack the knowledge to interrogate claims that are often the product of complex mathematical modeling across a range of disciplines. This expertise asymmetry poses a challenge for the effective regulation of fire safety designs, and the relative immaturity of fire safety engineering as a profession needs to be addressed before it would be wise to rely on professional competence and ethics alone to ensure safety.

Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12251

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:wly:reggov:v:13:y:2019:i:4:p:520-539

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Regulation & Governance from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().