Towards a New Era of Environmental Risk Regulation in the EU? Analysing the EU Regulatory Approach in a Comparative Perspective

Please note that due to the number of Papers, the Workshop Directors have decided to run this Workshop on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only. Environmental regulation is a well-established policy field in the European Union, and despite some identifiable trends of policy dismantling (Steinebach and Knill 2017; Lenschow, Burns and Zito 2020; Gravey and Jordan, 2021) has proven an area of continued regulatory activity, in particular on climate-related issues (Lenschow 2020). A more recent trend has been to incorporate climate risks into other policy fields. This has become most tangible for financial supervision and monetary policy, where climate risks have become incorporated into supervisory and policy practice as financial risks (Campiglio et al 2018; d’Orazio and Popoyan 2019). Moreover, there is an effort to ‘green’ the entire economy by tackling externalities of economic and commercial activities in manifold sectors, both with respect to harm done to nature and wildlife by unsustainable trade, but also human health, for instance through instruments of sustainable investment (Taylor 2020) and rules-based measures. These trends in environmental regulation have been epitomised through the EU’s so-called Green Deal agenda, adopted in 2019 (European Commission 2019). This agenda encompasses manifold sectors and aims at mobilising substantial amounts of funding. Moreover, it seeks to assert the EU’s regulatory power by setting global standards (Bradford 2020; Eckert 2020; Vogel 2012), deepening cooperation with the United States (EU-US Summit, 2021), and by outperforming China in particular. Climate change has been one of the top priorities of the Biden administration in the US (South et al. 2021), and China has asserted itself as a new hub of green innovation (Lewis 2012). In view of these recent trends, we posit that we are witnessing a process of transformative change in the area of environmental risk regulation, in view of the ever more urgent threats posed by climate change, resource scarcity and biodiversity loss. Given the complex characteristics of current environmental issues, proactive, adaptive and reflexive approaches to risk regulation, which can be adjusted as circumstances evolve, are necessary to deal with the high degree of uncertainties around hazards, and associated environmental impacts and risks (Orts, 1995; Munuo and Glazewski, 2018; Justo-Hanani and Dayan, 2021). At the same time, we must internalise long-term environmental risks to address the time-inconsistency problem inherent to more traditional regulatory approaches. This risk regulatory turn takes place, however, in times of mounting uncertainty, with fast-evolving risk perceptions as well as massive societal contestation (Beck, 1992; Vogel, 2012; Renn & Klinke, 2013). Moreover, profound regulatory change is complicated by continuing crisis and economic hardship in the EU and elsewhere.