Call for papers for the Special Issue in: “The history of safety legislation and the effectiveness paradigm: new approaches to regulatory analysis”
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2018-12-31
影响因子: 4.105
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 工程技术 - 2区
• 小类 : 工程:工业 - 2区
• 小类 : 运筹学与管理科学 - 2区
Overview
The different pace and manner in which regulatory systems — both rules themselves, and “regulatory delivery”, including permitting, inspections and enforcement institutions and practices etc. — have developed differs strongly between countries and regulatory domains. Even considering countries with otherwise relatively similar trajectories of economic and social development, there are important variations in when regulations were introduced e.g. in food safety, occupational safety, environmental protection etc., when and how they were reinforced, when institutions were created for their “delivery” and with which resources, structures and methods etc.
These differences in timelines, approaches, structures etc. offer rich opportunities to investigate what drivers led to the introduction of regulations and institutions in the first place (e.g. emergence of new risks, or change in risk perceptions etc.), what factors shaped their ulterior development, how much today’s regulatory systems owe to their historical emergence.
In addition, the historical perspective may allow to shed some light on the vexing issue of regulatory effectiveness. Although it is very difficult to attribute specific results to the action of one or several regulators or inspectorates, one could look at whether the creation of a new institution and/or the introduction of new rules led to an inflexion in the trend of e.g. fatal injuries at work or fatal food-borne disease cases (both of which tend to decrease anyway due to technological and economic progress, but do so at varying speed). Alternatively, one could consider two or more countries having had different timelines and approaches to introduction and development of regulation in a given domain, and see if the trendlines of outcomes (e.g. fatal cases etc.) differ.
Safety broadly defined is one of the most important areas of regulation, when considering both the scope of regulated sectors (in particular in terms of employment) and perceived importance from citizens/consumers perspective (even more so if, to technological and industrial safety one adds e.g. product safety). It also involves a considerable number of regulatory bodies, large numbers of public officials, impacts international trade, and is highly relevant to economic development issues.
In this respect, investigating the history of the emergence of safety regulation and inspectorates would potentially yield useful lessons for the design and/or transformation of existing systems, and help give at least some elements of answers to the question of whether regulation actually delivers its intended outcomes and/or whether different regulatory approaches effectively yield different results.
To take a few examples, veterinary or occupational safety regulations and regulatory institutions were introduced several decades later in the Netherlands compared to Germany or France. An investigation of statistical data e.g. on fatal occupational accidents could allow to see whether this changed the trend in the Netherlands, and/or how much that trend differs from Germany’s or France’s. Another interesting case is that of the drastic change in occupational safety rules and controls introduced by the 1970 US OSH Act and subsequent creation of OSHA – again offering a potential inflexion point where trends can be considered “before” and “after”.
Safety Science is calling for papers that apply a historical perspective on safety regulation and regulatory delivery for a special issue of the Journal devoted to both the factors determining or shaping the introduction or transformation of safety regulation, and to the outcomes of such changes in terms of actual safety trends. This is envisioned to create the basis for a number of new research directions around drivers and factors of the emergence/evolution of regulation, and comparative effectiveness studies.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Historical context, drivers etc. for introduction and change in regulation and regulatory institutions
- Comparative study of different jurisdictions’ timelines, institutions, approaches for a same regulatory domain
- Investigation of effectiveness of different regulatory systems through comparative approach (changes in trends before/after, and/or comparing different jurisdictions).