An Attribute Perspective on Regulatory Regimes in Risk Governance

Abstract Increasing interest from stakeholders has brought new focus on risk governance and risk regulation, such as the regulator’s execution of duty and tangible results on safety and environmental protection in oil and gas industry. One recent example, from 2019, is the Office of the Auditor General Norway’s (OAG) investigation of the Petroleum Safety Authority’s (PSA) follow-up on health, safety and the environment in the petroleum industry, where the regulatory regime in Norway resting on functional requirements was questioned. Simplistically speaking, there are two current traditions or main schools in regulatory regimes: use of functional requirements associated with co-regulation and use of normative requirements associated with prescriptive regulation. In this paper, we introduce a generic model from an attribute perspective on contrasting, gauging or evaluating the two different regulatory regimes. Furthermore, this approach may explain the controversy regarding the favouring of functional or prescriptive regulatory regimes by the different players in the industry. Our case is based on regulations relating to offshore oil and gas operations, in particular focusing on the Norwegian sector. We use the OAG’s investigation of the PSA and the public reaction as our material because this material is proposed to provide a thorough and valid description of how the effects of the Norwegian regulatory regime are perceived from the outside. We believe that the generic concept presented here is applicable when performing investigations in other industries involved in hazardous activities.