Robust regulatory regimes? Defenses against major accidents

The main objective of the project has been to evaluate, compare and assess the role of risk regulation and risk management in order to prevent major accidents in the oil and gas industry. During the project period, the project group has developed the interdisciplinary perspective encompassing legal, technological, regulatory, and behavioral and sociological perspectives. The project has contributed with results in a field poorly investigated in Norway. Several studies encompassing risk analysis, safety regulations, safety culture and so forth, but few studies connecting politics, governance and risk performance explicitly. Lack of comparative studies presents good arguments for continuing to support this particular research. One of the main objectives of the project was to enhance the interdisciplinary approach by combining and integrating elements from risk analysis with organizational theories and social science methods i.e. interviews and document analysis. Publications together with the PhD thesis performed in the project are in this respect important steps in such direction.

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The Robust regulation project (Lindøe, Baram & Renn 2014) provides a state of the art in understanding offshore risk regimes. The project has clearly documented that offshore oil and gas industry is characterised by a complex actor-network involving the o il companies, their supply chain on the upstream design and purchase side and on the downstream operations and maintenance subcontracting side, their workforce and its unions, the customers for the oil and gas, but also the public, the regulator and vario us interest and pressure groups. Norway is the most explicit and articulate in placing its tripartite structure as one of the key foundations of its regime. For the Norwegian regime there have been a number of threats to the equilibrium of the tripartit e process, the balance of power within those interactions. The disturbance of the balance led to union activism and conciliation by the regulator who restored the balance partly by threatening the employers with a return to prescriptive regulation. Differ ent views among employers and unions of the risk level was resolved by initiating the RNNS project to bring in independent researchers to study the risks and trends and establish sufficient consensus. Through this project we will further develop the inte rnational research group with cutting edge knowledge of risk regulations, risk governance and organizational accidents in the petroleum industry by comparing regimes in Norway, UK, US and Australia.