Recent accidents have challenged the ability of regulators to identify and/or influence the sociotechnical trends and risk drivers that increase the level of risk of major undesired events within safety critical systems. They question not only current regulatory practices but also the historical view of the evolution of regulations, regulatory bodies and inspection practices, their adaptation to the interpretative work produced in the aftermath of major events and also their adaptation to the advances in safety thinking.

Topics such as safety culture / climate, organisational factors, MTO, and resilience engineering are all current attempts to move beyond the technically oriented and administrative approaches, but few genuinely integrative applications exist in the field of regulation theory. This may be strongly related to the fact that safety as a particular science is still in its infancy and an abundance of different approaches, methods and tools exists. This makes it challenging for regulators to develop their approaches, as there are no agreed upon and clear foundations to be operationalized. In practical applications, human and technical issues are still usually considered as loosely coupled at best, and safety inspections and auditing is easily reduced to either technical or administrative endeavour. A systemic view with associated methods and tools is missing. This project aims to contribute to this genuine need for an integrative account of the sociotechnical view, an account of its practical and scientific meaning and guidance on how to manage and regulate safety in today’s complex economy.