ALBERT

Description: This volume explores the governance of the transforming Arctic from an international perspective. Leading and emerging scholars in Arctic research investigate the international causes and consequences of contemporary Arctic developments, and assess how both state and non-state actors respond to crucial problems for the global community. Long treated as a remote and isolated region, climate change and economic prospects have put the Arctic at the forefront of political agendas from the local to the global level, and this book tackles the variety of involved actors, institutional politics, relevant policy issues, as well as political imaginaries related to a globalizing Arctic. It covers new institutional forms of various stakeholder engagement on multiple levels, governance strategies to combat climate change that affect the Arctic region sooner and more strongly than other regions, the pros and cons of Arctic resource development for the region and beyond, and local and trans-boundary pollution concerns. Given the growing relevance of the Arctic to international environmental, energy and security politics, the volume helps to explain how the region is governed in times of global nexuses, multi-level politics and multi-stakeholderism.

Description: How risks are regulated can affect domestic outcomes, such as the benefits and costs of protecting consumers, health and environment, and it can also foster or limit opportunities for international trade. A question addressed in this report is whether different approaches to risk regulation lead to different levels of protection.Based on a study commissioned by the European Parliament in 2016, this report offers a descriptive transatlantic comparison of regulatory standards in four key sectors: Food, automobiles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals. It shows that EU risk regulation is not always or generally more stringent than US regulation. The reality is a complex mix of parity and particularity between EU and US risk regulation.The reality of transatlantic regulation is not a simple dichotomy of a European approach versus an American approach. It is not EU precaution versus US reaction, or ex-ante versus ex-post legal systems, or civil law versus common law, or uncertainty-based versus evidence-based regulatory systems. Rather, the reality is overall EU-US parity as well as some particular variation in policies on both sides of the Atlantic. This includes both cases of greater European stringency and cases of greater US stringency.On the other hand, regulatory variation can also be the basis for learning to improve future regulatory design, both by comparing outcomes across regulations in different jurisdictions, and by planning adaptive regulation over time. International regulatory cooperation involves collaboration to review existing regulations and design new approaches that improve outcomes for all. The EU and US can learn from this variation, and from evolving understanding, to improve regulatory standards through monitoring, evaluation, impact assessment, and planned adaptive regulation.