Principio de precaución, políticas públicas y riesgo

Abstract

This article maintains that Beck’s risk society approach, rather than the cultural-anthropological one of Douglas or the works based on Foucault’s governmentality, is the most useful one when analysing the principle of precaution. This is because Beck’s theory views precaution as a policy instrument designed to tackle risk, understood both as a cultural construct and as an objective phenomenon. The analysis also focuses on the principle of precaution itself and points out that its applicability has stretched to cover many different policy fields and, partly as a result, it lacks precision, as the many definitions of it show. Further, it demands a logic of action that runs counter to established politico-institutional routines. After examining how the principle of precaution has originated in German environmental policy, the article goes on to analyse the politico-commercial conflicts that its application has unleashed and which affect both the European Union and the United States.