How integrated risk policies emerge ?

The ACE project aims at clarifying by a comparative approach the conditions limiting or supporting the promotion of public policies based on  toxic substances aggregate exposure (multiple ways ) or cumulated (multiple compounds).

After the development these last decades of more realistic methods of assessment of these risks, ACE proposes to explore how they are translated into regulatory tools,  the progress and  difficulties to put them in action as instrument of public publices in health and environmental sectors. Through a series of case studies, ACE aims to identify the factors supporting a more integrated approach.

The Ace project is funded by Fondation de France, CNRS, EHESP , Maison des sciences de l’Homme (Bretagne),  Université of Rennes

A pluridisciplinary project

The originality of the ACE project is threefold:

1. if  assessment methods  of multi-exposures  have strongly developed, very few analyses in social science explore how they are integrated into account public policies in various settings.

2. Breaking with the trend in the literature to develop national monographs by substance, ACE introduces a comparison between national contexts and between toxic substances.

3. The team of ACE includes competences from different scientific fields (political science,toxicology, expology) which will be used for the selection of the cases study, analysis of evolutions and exploration of factors influencing the decision making.

Methodology

The general methodological framework will be a series of case studies (n=15) allowing for a detailed knowledge of the processes, but also a quali-comparative analysis (QCA) aiming at exploring more general causal conditions.

The investigation will be based on a sample of substances / country case studies, chosen for their contrasted characteristics. ACE will concentrate mainly on the methods containing biomonitoring (in and on a selection of alternative methods (addition of the toxicity). The list of the substancespotentially concerned will associate identified substances (lead, dioxanes) and compounds relatively less studied  (heavy metals; brominated retarders of flame;perfluorés; PCB; aldehydes; pesticides).