Consumer desire for superior and new products has provided industry with the opportunity and market demand to incorporate and experiment with new technologies, including nanotechnologies. While these products and processes have fallen under the scope of existing regulatory frameworks, potential health and safety concerns has prompted some stakeholders to call for new, nano-specific regulations. Until now, governments have been hesitant to respond to such demands given the evolving state of the scientific art and limited international agreement as to what nanotechnologies or nanomaterials “are”. Despite these challenges, in November 2009 the European Union formally embraced the idea of specifically regulating the use of nanomaterials in cosmetic formulations. To achieve this objective, the Parliament and Council had to define what they meant by nanomaterials within the context of the adopted text in order to regulate them. It appears likely that other instruments will be similarly amended so as to include nano-specific provisions, including definitions. This article explores this policy shift within the European Union and the implications of the Parliament and Council's stance at this stage due to the absence of a generally accepted definition within the international community.

Good regulation is essential, to protect employees, consumers and the public, as well as the environment. To argue that the market should be allowed to be the determinant of working conditions, together with a bit of exhortation to employers to behave decently, is to accept the Victorian approach that allowed children to work in coal mines.

The massive problems in the finance sector recently also show only too well the impact of weak regulation and de-regulation.

That said, Governments do not always get it right when they do regulate and there is undoubtedly some regulation that is no longer necessary, or is out of date, or is over-complicated or hard to enforce. Neither have Governments showed themselves to be very good at assessing public risk or balancing public health and environment protection with innovation and growth. As the former Risk and Regulation Advisory Council suggested, risk is often assessed through the prism of media sensationalism, political point scoring, civil service attachment to legislation and “risk mongers” such as insurance companies that have a vested interest in talking up risk.

On 27 May 2014, after two years of debates and extensive amendments by the EU’s law-making institutions, the EU Clinical Trial Regulation1 was published. The Regulation repeals and replaces the Clinical Trials Directive, an instrument described by the European Commission as “arguably the most heavily criticised piece of EU-legislation in the area of pharmaceuticals”. The Clinical Trials Regulation is intended to improve the existing framework, and will become applicable at the earliest on 28 May 2016. This report reviews the most significant changes to the existing system brought about by the Clinical Trials Regulation, and how this Regulation purports to strike a balance between its objective of increasing clinical trial activity in the EU and the need to protect clinical trial subjects’ rights, safety and well-being.

Safety regulations are too often disproportional in the sense that their costs outweigh the benefits. Although this is well known, years of trying to reduce safety related regulatory pressure has not resulted in much success. Two important causes for this have not received much attention up to now. One of these is a faulty perception of how the general public regards risk. We argue that the intractable citizen's behaviour needs better understanding. The second cause is the single-mindedness of risk experts which calls for specific instruments to be harnessed.

Nanomaterials have been the object of numerous public and private initiatives aiming to manage their risks and maximise their benefits. Proponents of nanotechnology programmes argue that their potential negative impacts need to be dealt with appropriately, and wish to integrate these concerns early in the industrial development of these substances. Science policy programmes do not provide a clear definition of the term “nanomaterials”. Defining nanomaterials, however, has become a central concern. It is called for by manufacturers who wish to sell the “nano” quality of their products as well as by associations who wish to classify products in order to facilitate consumer choice or introduce constraints on production.

This is more than an obscure technical and legal issue for specialists. Indeed, science and technology studies has shown that technical classifications perform social order, and that the creation of new entities destabilises the conduct of democratic life. For instance, Sheila Jasanoff demonstrates that the “ontological uncertainty” of biotechnological objects leads to the construction of different political forms in the United States and Europe. Building a legal and technical framework for biotechnology objects allocates public roles, defines expertise objectivity, and identifies public concerns – in short, it shapes political organisations at the same time as it constructs technological definitions.

This report analyzes the tobacco carve-out clause (as well as the negotiations that led to its adoption) included in the final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which permits the TPP Parties to deny investors that challenge their tobacco control measures access to the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. The report also discusses the potential advantages and disadvantages of such a solution.

As a volcano refugee in Frankfurt, it was rather interesting to see a slow motion regulatory science disaster taking place. On April 14 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted sending millions of tons of ash into the upper atmosphere. The ash cloud, blown by the prevailing winds, moved down over northern Europe. European air traffic authorities, following well established and widely published safety protocols, began shutting down the air transport system due to the well known hazard of volcano ash. The shutdown lasted 6 days and soon became an unequal political contest between airline money on the one side and regulatory science on the other. In a classic case of shooting the messenger bringing bad news the responsible airline parties tried to shift the blame for shutdown to the regulators, while nervous governments quailed before the bullying of the airline executives.

This article argues that European Union (EU) risk regulation of hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) was both a trigger and formative factor in the development of similar Chinese regulation. The attractiveness and global interdependence of the EU market in EEE impelled a response from Chinese policy-makers. Fostering the domestic industry's global competitiveness was one of the driving factors behind Chinese substance restriction regulation. Additionally, symbolic emulation and growing domestic environmental problems related to waste EEE infl uenced the Chinese policy agenda. Chinese substance restriction rules are not, however, a mere copy of EU regulation. The limited domestic capacity of the Chinese economy, administration, and legal structure to adopt policies similar to those of the EU explains, to a large extent, the emergence and partial persistence of differences between EU and Chinese risk regulation. In the course of the implementation and evaluation of Chinese substance restriction regulation, lessons learned from the EU’s experience increasingly contributed to shaping the policy, leading to growing convergence.

Traditionally, theories on regulation have suggested choosing the “right” regulatory tool for a given situation of desired behavioral steering, using a broad theoretical approach of understanding the factors involved in the regulatory realm and speculating from it toward the efficient choice.

By contrast, this paper will argue that the process of choosing the “right” regulatory tool should be guided by an opposite process, in which a searchable database of regulatory case studies (“Global-Regulation”) will be created. The institution (i.e., governments, regulation agencies, etc.) seeking to steer behavior using regulatory tools (“The Regulator”) will search Global-Regulation using the specific characters of its situation (i.e., industry, regulationmethod, country, etc.), to find relevant case-studies that will lead to the best regulatory solution.

It is assumed that this approach will establish regulation and regulatory tools as an empirical process of selection guided by a global accumulated body of knowledge, that will eventually create amore efficient and successful regulation and hence, desired behavior. The first part of this paper will provide an overview of regulatory learning. The second part will describe the Global-regulation database. The third partwill develop an example of the way in which case studies will be indexed into the Global-Regulation database. The fourth part will discuss the benefits of Global-Regulation to scholars and its symbiotic relationship with the research in the regulatory field. Finally, this paper will address possible problemswith the suggested system.