European Parliament Working Group on Risk: A Commentary

Abstract

Over the past 40 years or so, risk governance has become central to the EU project. Pan-EU risk governance frameworks have been critical in creating a level regulatory playing field for European business; they have provided the necessary coordination to tackle harms that cross the jurisdictional boundaries of member states; and they have brought harms under control that member state governments have neither capacity nor will in the political cycle to focus on. However, as Lofstedt points out in this issue, as the EU has extended its writ over ever more domains of risk, so have its risk decision-making processes and principles increasingly become the subject of controversy and challenge. In that context, the European Parliament’s Informal Working Group on Risk is a welcome opportunity to improve the understanding of, and provide advice on, “risk” in EU policy processes. That is an important objective because, as Lofstedt points out, the idea of “risk” stands at the center of a number of critical questions in policy making in the EU. How far should governments go to eliminate harms that confront society? How should governments act under uncertainty? How should governments manage the distributional conflicts of policies that secure safety for some but expose others to danger? These are, of course, universal questions to which there are no easy answers. Increasingly, however, governments around the world have started to pay more attention to risk ideas in an attempt to better understand the problems that they confront. By taking into account probability as well as the impact of potential adverse regulatory outcomes, risk-based approaches to policy making offer the promise of