Title: Risk-Risk Tradeoffs in Regulatory Governance
Presenter:Professor Jonathan Wiener
Time: 4.2 15:00-16:30
Location:A1048
About the presenter:
Jonathan B. Wiener is the William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law, and Professor of Public Policy and Environmental Policy, at Duke University. He received his A.B. in economics (1984) and J.D. (1987) from Harvard University, and served as a law clerk to federal judges Jack Weinstein and Stephen Breyer (1987-89). At the US Department of Justice and the Council of Economic Advisers, he helped negotiate the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) (1992) and helped draft the President’s executive order on benefit-cost review of regulation (1993). In 2008, he served as President of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). In 2010-14, he was an author of the chapter on “International Cooperation” in the IPCC 5thAssessment Report on climate change mitigation. In 2015, he was a member of the CCICED special study team on environmental risk management for China. His publications include the booksPolicy Shock: Recalibrating Risk and Regulation after Oil Spills, Nuclear Accidents, and Financial Crises(Camb. Univ. Press, 2017);The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the United States and Europe(RFF Press/Routledge, 2011),Reconstructing Climate Policy(AEI Press, 2003), and Risk vs. Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and Environment(Harvard Univ. Press, 1995; Chinese translation, Tsinghua Univ. Press, 2018). For more about him, see https://www.law.duke.edu/fac/wiener/.
Abstract:
We live in a multi-risk world, with numerous risks to health, safety, environment and security. But many well-intended regulatory policies address one target risk at a time. This yields at least three key implications. First, in an interconnected world, each effort to address one risk may also affect other risks, leading to risk-risk tradeoffs – unintended ancillary impacts (potentially ancillary harms or ancillary benefits). These phenomena are ubiquitous, so societies need better policy analysis to confront and weigh risk tradeoffs, and better regulatory policy designs to overcome risk tradeoffs by reducing multiple risks in concert. Second, faced with multiple risks, policy makers have to select some priorities. Although the conventional stereotype is that some countries are “more precautionary” than others, our review of evidence on actual policies indicates that the reality is a selective and diverse application of precaution across the array of risks in each polity. Third, the future of environmental risk regulation is adaptive learning: from variation across jurisdictions, and from evidence of performance outcomes over time.
