* * *
Transatlantic conflicts over the regulation of environmental
and health and safety threats—including climate change, chemicals, and food
safety concerns—have repeatedly revolved around the international status
and legitimacy of the precautionary principle, which pertains to regulation of
scientifically uncertain harms.
Against this backdrop, comparative environmental scholars
have recently focused their attention on whether, when, and why Europe has
become more precautionary than the United States. This inquiry has
entailed a debate on the capacity of distinct American and European regulatory
traditions to account for transatlantic divisions. The
Reality of Precaution, by Jonathan Wiener with several co-editors,
and The Politics of
Precaution, by David Vogel, are among the most notable contributions to
this discussion. The two books concur that any such legal-institutional
traditions are irrelevant to the question at hand.
For Wiener, this conclusion derives from the absence of
consistent patterns of stringency on either side of the Atlantic. For
Vogel, it is a function of the instability and ostensible recent emergence of
the current transatlantic split. Together, it might seem these books have
put to rest an entire family of historical-institutional explanations for
cross-national regulatory differences in the transatlantic context and beyond.
This conclusion is limited, however, by both books’ implicit
conception of the precautionary principle; for both, timing and stringency of
regulation are conclusive indicators of precaution. Yet risk aversion as
reflected in regulatory timing and stringency is not the only, or most
important, lens for assessing the relevance of historical legal and political
institutions to European-American divisions over precaution.
For this purpose it is essential to distinguish between two
central meanings of the precautionary principle as it is discussed today—the
first prescriptive, the second permissive. [continue
reading here…]
No comments:
Post a Comment