A comparative study of the legislative risk regulation of Norwegian petroleum and coal mining industry, and Russian coal mining industry

Abstract

Regulating risk carries the potential of improving the safety of workers, protect the environment and prevent financial losses. Risk regulation has gained a lot of global interest these past decades. New equipment is developed to protect workers, new techniques are used in order to reduce the possibility of harming the environment and new methods of assessing risk are established. In other words, risk regulation is a very encompassing activity. This thesis has examined the legislative risk regulation of three different industries: the Norwegian petroleum industry, the Norwegian coal mining industry, and the Russian coal mining industry. By choosing these specific industries it was possible to compare how legislative risk regulation is carried out across industries and national borders. Both the Norwegian petroleum industry and the Russian coal mining industry represents core industries for their respective countries. However, the coal mining industry is of less importance in Norway. This allowed for comparing the legislative risk regulation of one of the largest industries in Norway to one an industry of less significance. The comparison was carried out by scrutinizing the legal documents forming the legislative framework regulating risk for the three industries. The motivation for conducting this comparative analysis is to examine how each industry manages risk-related challenges. This allows for the regulators to learn from each other and adopt solutions used by others in order to regulate risk more efficiently. This comparative analysis has focused on three criteria: the general characteristics of the legal documents, the use of enforced self-regulation as a regulatory strategy, and the use of safety management systems. The study shows there is a clear difference as to how Russian regulators regulates risk compared to the regulators of the Norwegian petroleum and coal mining industry. While the Norwegian legal regulation makes heavy use of performance based requirements, the Russian regulation uses prescriptive requirements. This has great impact on the extensiveness and specificity of the legal documents. As prescriptive requirements are more specific there is a greater need for more extensive legal documents. The use of prescriptive requirements also hampers the use of enforced self-regulation as a regulatory strategy. While the use of enforced self-regulation is prominent for the regulation of the Norwegian industries, the Russian legislative risk regulation makes very limited use of this regulatory strategy. The Russian use of this strategy is mainly encountered when examining requirements regarding the safety management system. The use of such a safety management system is also more prominent for the regulation of the Norwegian industries. However, this thesis concludes that compliance of the requirements regarding this management system is met by using the same standard for the Norwegian petroleum industry and the Russian coal mining industry. The study also finds that there is a clear difference between the extensiveness of the regulations concerning the Norwegian coal mining industry and the Norwegian petroleum industry. While the regulation on Norwegian coal mining is very brief, the Norwegian petroleum industry is regulated by more comprehensive regulations. This is considered to be due to the sizes of the two industries. However, both industries are regulated by performance based requirements and by heavy use of enforced self-regulation.