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Kenan faculty help draft report for International Risk Governance Council

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Jonathan Wiener, co-director of the Rethinking Regulation program at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, is the lead co-author of a new report from the International Risk Governance Council, “Transatlantic Patterns of Risk Regulation: Implications for International Trade and Cooperation.”

The report, prepared by the IRGC and commissioned by the European Parliament, is intended to help inform U.S. – E.U. relations regarding regulatory policies, including in trade negotiations and in interagency cooperation.  Wiener and his co-authors focus on four sectors in their analysis: food safety, automobile safety and emissions, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals.  The report offers recommendations for international regulatory cooperation, learning from policy variation, and planned adaptive regulation.

“Studying observed regulatory variation, and even experimentation, can assess differences in outcomes from different regulatory approaches, better choices among current standards, and new approaches not yet adopted by either side,” they write in the report. “Both the US and Europe could benefit from such policy learning – to increase benefits, lower costs and avoid ancillary harms.”

The new IRGC report builds on Kenan’s Rethinking Regulation symposium on US-EU Regulatory Cooperation, held in April 2016, on the issue New Approaches to International Regulatory Cooperation that Wiener co-edited in the journal Law & Contemporary Problems (2015), and on Wiener’s book The Reality of Precaution: Comparing Risk Regulation in the US and Europe (2011).

Along with Jonathan Wiener, who also serves as William R. and Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law at Duke Law School, Professor of Environmental Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy, the co-authors of the IRGC report include scholars from the U.S. and Europe:

  • Arthur C. Petersen, University College London, UK
  • John D. Graham, Indiana University, USA
  • Kenneth A. Oye, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
  • Ortwin Renn, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Germany
  • Christina Benighaus, Dialogik, Germany
  • Marie-Valentine Florin, Managing Director of IRGC, Switzerland, supervised the preparation of the report.
  • Ten peer reviewers provided comments that helped improve the report.

To read the full text, visit the International Risk Governance Council website.

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