Changing Regulation: Controlling Risks in Society

by Barry Kirwan, Andrew Hale, Andrew Hopkins

Safety regulation is society's way of keeping the genie of technology in the bottle, whilst still exploiting its power for creating wealth and change. It is a difficult compromise to make. Regulators often have a thankless task. If all seems to go well they are painted as too repressive and anti-technological; if disaster strikes, the searchlight of media attention increasingly focuses on them, looking for lax enforcement, blind eyes being turned and cosy relations with the regulated. This title explores the dilemmas of the regulator through case studies presented by the regulators themselves and through research-based analyses from different disciplines of the workings of the regulators and the regulatory system. More importantly it surveys the tools available to resolve the dilemmas and asks what we know about their successes and shortcomings and what can be learned over the boundaries of industries and technologies about the principles of successful safety regulation. Chapters are written by authors from seven countries, with an international perspective. They examine the role of certification, safety cases, strictly enforced detailed rules, professional regulation and self-regulation. The text covers new risks such as those from medical devices and biotechnology, as well as the well-known fields of nuclear power, chemical plants, mining, oil and gas production, railways and the traditionally difficult area of small companies.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Barry (J F) Kirwan is a split personality. He writes science fiction under the name Barry Kirwan, and thrillers under his pen name J F Kirwan. In his day job, he travels worldwide, working on aviation safety. He lives in Paris, where he first joined a fiction class – and became hooked! This led to an acclaimed four-book series called the Eden Paradox. But when a back injury stopped him scuba diving for two years, he wrote a thriller series about a young Russian woman, Nadia, where a lot of the action occurred in dangerously deep waters. Since then he wrote a serial killer thriller called The Dead Tell Lies, and is writing a new scifi series starting with When the Children Come....