Implementing the Precautionary Principle: Perspectives And Prospects

✍ Scribed by Judith S. Jones, Rene Von Schomberg

• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 352
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This challenging book takes a broad and thought-provoking look at the precautionary principle and its implementation, or potential implementation, in a number of fields. In particular, the essays within the book explore the challenges faced by public decision-making processes when applying the precautionary principle, including its role in risk management and risk assessment. Frameworks for improved decision making are considered, followed by a detailed analysis of prospective applications of the precautionary principle in a number of emerging fields including: nanotechnology, climate change, natural resource management and public health policy. The analysis is both coherent and interdisciplinary, employing perspectives from law, the social sciences and public policy with a view to improving both the legitimacy and effectiveness of public policy at national and international levels. Bringing together authors from both policy making and academia and from a wide range of disciplines and jurisdictions, this book will be of interest to academic scholars interested in environmental policy, law and politics.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 5
Figures......Page 7
Boxes......Page 8
Contributors......Page 11
Preface......Page 15
1. Implementing the precautionary principle: perspectives and prospects......Page 17
PART 1 - General Implications of the Precautionary Principle for Public Decision Making......Page 33
2. The precautionary principle and its normative challenges......Page 35
3. The role of science and precaution in environmental and public health policy......Page 58
4. The precautionary principle and catastrophism on tenterhooks: lessons from a constitutional reform in France......Page 79
5. Precautionary policy assessment for sustainability......Page 104
PART II - The Challenges Involved in Implementing the Precautionary Principle......Page 127
6. The precautionary principle and administrative constitutionalism: the development of frameworks for applying the precautionary principle......Page 129
7. The burden and standard of proof in environmental regulation: the precautionary principle in an Australian administrative context......Page 153
8. Tr(e)ading cautiously: precaution in WTO decision making......Page 176
9. The threshold test of the precautionary principle in Australian courts and tribunals: lessons for judicial review......Page 198
10. Precautionary only in name? Tensions between precaution and risk assessment in the Australian GMO reulatory framework*......Page 218
PART III - Prospective Applications of the Precautionary Principle in Specific Fields......Page 237
11. A long and winding road? Precaution from principle to practice in biodiversity conservation......Page 239
12. Climate change and the precautionary principle......Page 261
13. The tension between fiction and precaution in nanotechnology......Page 286
14. A framework for the precautionary governance of food safety: integrating science and participation in the social appraisal of risk......Page 300
Index......Page 332