EU and South Korean Chemicals Policy: Tackling the Challenge of Anticipation and Adaptiveness?

Chemicals are ubiquitous in our daily lives. Many of them have useful benefits but some are hazardous and can pose tremendous risks to humans and the environment. Historically, policymakers tended to adopt regulation reactively, after tragic chemical accidents had happened or many people had fallen ill. For this reason, anticipating risks and regulating them proactively was one of the main drivers of adopting the European Union (EU) Regulation on Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). It aims to generate significant amounts of data about chemicals’ toxicity and uses, so that the regulator can assess and address risks faster. The process of collecting and evaluating chemicals involves public and private actors and marks a departure from the previous approach in which regulators carried the bulk of the responsibility. A few years after the EU pioneered with its REACH Regulation did South Korean adopt a law that generally is called Korea REACH. It bears many similarities to the EU approach but also some differences due to the country’s lower regulatory capacity, different political dynamics and several other factors. This paper analyses and compares the EU and the South Korean chemicals laws and focuses on the question: To what extent and how are the EU and Korea REACH regulatory processes proactive and adaptive?