Risk as an Approach to Regulatory Governance: An Evidence Synthesis and Research Agenda

Governments around the world have begun to develop and implement risk governance and risk-based regulation and are often inspired by the insights from risk studies in doing so. Following these developments, scholars have begun to map, explore, and interrogate risk governance models and strategies and risk-based regulatory approaches and instruments, and their performance. This article presents an evidence of academic literature on risk as an approach to regulatory governance. It follows the logic and applies tools of meta-research, a systematic and replicable process of synthesizing research findings across a body of original research. Following a staged approach, 135 peer-reviewed journal articles from an initial body of 1,125 articles were analyzed. The article presents the main findings from the evidence synthesis, presents the gaps in our knowledge, and suggests a future agenda for research on risk as an approach to regulatory governance. The article finds that despite ongoing conceptual and normative debates about the need for risk governance and risk-based regulation, we lack a good understanding of how it operates in practice. Future scholarship is urged to be critical of the potential gap between academic and policy rhetoric on risk-based regulatory governance and the application of this approach to regulatory governance on the ground.