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The Reality of Risk Regulation

In some form or another, risk regulation has been the common thread in virtually all of my academic and professional endeavours. Over the course of my career, my own thinking about risk and risk regulation and our collective approaches to risk regulation has evolved substantially, albeit not consistently in the same direction. In this essay, I briefly describe my own academic professional involvement with risk regulation in a historical perspective. Through this description, I explain how I got into this wide-ranging, fascinating area, and why I found, and continue to find, it highly interesting. In the second part, I discuss a tentative definition of risk regulation, in an attempt to identify the boundaries with other areas of regulatory activity. As discussed there, the breadth of this area makes it interesting, but also renders it hard to define with much precision. The final part sets forth some thoughts on the future of risk regulation and research in this area. More attention should be paid to the reality of risk regulation, in particular the role of science and of activism. If the current trends continue, risk regulation will likely only increase in scope and intrusiveness. In the real world, risk regulation itself involves risks; I discuss five such risks.