Our research

CARR became an ESRC-funded research centre in October 2000, building on core funding for a chair from the Michael Peacock Charitable Foundation. In its first five years, CARR provided a unique environment for interdisciplinary and comparative research by scholars of regulation and of risk management.

In October 2005, CARR began work on its second five-year programme of research with core funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).  The CARR research agenda is defined by three methodological commitments:

• A wide ranging focus on the institutional settings for the regulation of risk;
  
  
• A comparative focus on a variety of national contexts and cultures;
  
  
• A comparative focus on overlapping 'risk-processing-domains' (eg, food, finance, environment, operations; organisation-wide risk management; the interaction of different risk regimes; and 'complex risk').
   

Risk regulation refers to the governance, accountability and processing of risks, both within organisations as part of their risk management and compliance functions, and also at the level of regulatory and other agencies that constitute 'risk regulation regimes'.

CARR's programme of work consists of a number of discrete projects, each of which will address one or more of three cross-cutting themes:

• Performance, accountability and information
   
• Knowledge, technology and expertise
   
• Reputation, security and trust

It is envisaged that individual projects will address established risk regulation topics, for example discussion of state responses to risks and how one might explain variations in risk regimes; the influence of risk debates on regulatory policy; and trans-boundary risk regulation. They will, however, add a number of distinctive features to these established themes:

• a concern with organisational risk management scholarship, a literature that is of growing relevance as risk management approaches are advocated by the government as a way of organising their public service activities;
  
• consideration of regulation beyond the state - this embraces conceptualisations of regulation as de-centred from the state and focuses on the broadening participatory base for regulation and risk management practices.
  
• a focus on the social and institutional character of risk management techniques, including quantitative methods and models.

More generally, CARR is committed to building theoretical and empirical linkages between studies of risk management and of regulatory processes, and to developing interdisciplinary studies at the intersection of management, sociology, organisation theory, economics, political science and law.

Additional information about research is available from LSE's Research and Project Development Division.

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