Risk Governance of Offshore Oil and Gas Operations

This book evaluates and compares risk regulation and safety management for offshore oil and gas operations in the United States, United Kingdom, Norway, and Australia. It provides an interdisciplinary approach with legal, technological, and sociological perspectives on their efforts to assess and prevent major accidents and improve safety performance offshore. Presented in three parts, the volume begins with a review of the technical, legal, behavioral, and sociological factors involved in designing, implementing, and enforcing a regulatory regime for industrial safety. It then evaluates the four regulatory regimes that encompass the cultural, legal, and other contextual factors that influence their design and implementation, along with their reliance on industrial expertise and standards and the use of performance indicators. The final section presents an assessment of the resilience of the Norwegian regime and its capacity to keep pace with new technologies and emerging risks, respond to near miss incidents, encourage safety culture, incorporate vested rights of labor, and perform inspection and self-audit functions. This book is highly relevant for those in government, business, academia, and elsewhere in civil society who are involved in offshore safety issues, including regulatory authorities and industrial safety professionals.

Preben H. Lindøe is Professor of Societal Safety at the University of Stavanger, Norway. He has an MS and a PhD on the implementation of 'enforced self-regulation' in Norway from the Technical University of Trondheim. He has worked within applied research for twenty-five years, including action-research methodology, occupational health and safety, risk regulation and safety management. His publications include various books (in Norwegian) as well as articles, papers and chapters in professional and academic journals, books and other media.

Michael Baram is Professor Emeritus at Boston University Law School where he directed the Center for Law and Technology. He was also a partner in the law firm Bracken and Baram for twenty-five years, and previously had been Associate Professor of Engineering and Assistant Dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research, publications, legal work and advisory activities have dealt with risk regulation, environmental law, product liability law, occupational safety and risk management in several technological sectors, including the chemicals, biotech, nuclear, and oil and gas industries. He is the author or editor of eight books, most recently Governing Risk in GM Agriculture (2010, with Mathilde Bourrier), and has published numerous articles.

Ortwin Renn is Professor and Chair of Environmental Sociology and Technology Assessment at Stuttgart University, Germany. He directs the Stuttgart Research Center for Risk and Innovation at Stuttgart University and the non-profit company DIALOGIK, a research institute for the investigation of communication and participation processes in environmental policy making. Renn is primarily interested in risk governance, political participation and technology assessment. He has published more than 30 books and 250 articles, most prominently the monograph Risk Governance (2008).