ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s, both the scope and stringency of environmental and consumer protection have significantly expanded in all industrialized countries. At the same time, regulatory politics and policies continue to exhibit substantial cross-national variation. For example, within Europe, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway are often regarded as environmental ‘pioneers’, while Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal are considered environmental ‘laggards’ (Andersen and Liefferink, 1997). Over the last three decades, the former have typically been the first to enact new environmental regulations and their standards have tended to be relatively stringent, while ‘laggard’ countries have adopted regulations later and their standards tend to be weaker and less comprehensive. ‘Although policy agendas, broadly speaking, have converged on a host of issues worldwide, specific national policies for managing health, safety and environmental risk continue to diverge, even when they are ostensibly based on the same bodies of scientific information (Jasanoff, 2000).
