Risk policy tools for high-risk industrial sites in Normandy (France) and Piedmont (Italy): more hazards-focused than vulnerabilities-focused

Industrial risk policy systems englobe diverse risk policy tools (e.g. tools focused on hazard reduction or vulnerability reduction), various actors (public, private, and intermediary actors), and a spectrum of normative components (e.g. command-and-control and self-regulation measures). For high-risk sites, the effectiveness of risk policy systems, indicating to what extent prescriptions can prevent major accidents, avoid crises, and maintain balanced trade-offs in the long term in practice, is important to be assessed ex-ante (i.e. before major accident occurrence). This requires a deeper understanding of how policies are structured around tools directed toward achieving risk policy goals, which is rarely covered by literature taking into account the full set of policy tools. Therefore, this paper raises the research question: how is the industrial risk policy system structured around practical risk policy tools for high-risk sites to contribute to policy effectiveness? Based on a regulatory review, this paper scrutinizes the risk-related public policies and their risk tools for high-risk sites in Normandy (France) and Piedmont (Italy) for the first time. It also examines the integration of vulnerability concept into the French and Italian risk policy systems for high-risk sites taking into account the regional level. Findings, relying on two cases and fostering conceptual thinking, reveals an important assessment criterion appears as a pre-condition to an effective risk policy: ‘adequacy and appropriateness’ of the risk policy tools for high-risk sites covering the coherence of the tool with the main policy objectives and the suitability and sufficiency of these tools to cover both hazard-based and vulnerability-based concerns. Hazard-focused tools appeared to remain dominant with limited implicit considerations of vulnerabilities especially related to human and material damage. Limitations and further work include adding the actors’ perceptions in the risk governance system and exploring other assessment criteria to propose an adapted assessment framework for high-risk policies.