The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for inclusive risk governance to address systemic risks that extend beyond health crisis to encompass broader societal, economic, and political dimensions. This article examines the evolution of risk governance in the United Kingdom and South Korea, exploring the intersectionality between state capacity, risk governance, and critical human security. It investigates how different institutional and policy frameworks and political choices influence the evolution of risk governance in two countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that both countries adaptively restructured their institutions and broadened the involvement of diverse stakeholders to address the systemic risk. However, significant challenges persisted in fully integrating diverse perspectives due to the limited capacity of coordination across different actors and scales of government within risk governance. This research calls for a rearticulation of risk governance frameworks that integrate human security and inclusive participation, particularly as risks become increasingly complex and intersect across multiple dimensions of daily life.

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.

We examine the use of forced confinement and isolation to limit the spread of COVID-19 in Ontario prisons and jails. Drawing on interview data, we illustrate how a reliance on forced confinement and isolation has exacerbated harms experienced by prisoners in relation to physical, mental, and social health. Through discourse analysis of grey literature, we then discuss the politics and governance of carceral institutions during the pandemic, focusing on how practices of isolation were legitimized during the pandemic, despite recent rulings establishing isolation and segregation as torture. We close by arguing that the case of isolation during the pandemic is one example which highlights the systemic and ongoing nature of rights violations in Canadian prisons and jails. To address these harms, we must shift focus away from reform and towards decarceration.

A major outcome of ERM activities in insurance companies has been the bringing together of all of the key risks in the company, to be managed collectively in a holistic fashion. The authors of this paper believe that an ERM framework also needs to look beyond the company, and have regard to the risk management needs of investors, from the point of view of the contribution of the insurance company to the overall risk and reward of their total investment portfolios. To meet these needs, the ERM framework needs to provide sufficient information on topics such as systematic risk, potential correlations of earnings from future new business with macroeconomic trends, other risks to franchise value, and sources of model risk within the company. The paper does not provide solutions for the issues described above; but limits itself to describing and discussing the direction for some important new initiatives in ERM activities.