Evaluation of governmental safety regulatory functions in preventing major accidents in China

Governmental safety regulatory functions play an important role in preventing major accidents by incorporating lessons from both the investigation of major accidents and the theory of system accident causation. However, to date, these functions have not been evaluated. In China, a unique aspect of accident prevention is that the government engages in macro-safety regulation. In this paper, the analysis process of the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is applied to the Chinese safety regulatory system to classify and evaluate governmental safety regulatory functions. The results show that there are nine main regulatory functions, and they are divided into four levels. The potential performance variability in the outputs of regulatory functions influences other functions through up-down coupling. The entire regulatory system could therefore undergo unexpected changes that could lead to major accidents. The two most important functions are F1, formulating a plan, and F2, enacting laws and regulations. This system reverses the past view of focusing only on the non-compliance behaviours of government regulators and companies. Some safety constraints are proposed in this paper, which mainly include monitoring and suppression, to reduce the unreasonable output of functions and unexpected changes. This paper provides a new perspective for other countries to further evaluate their governmental safety regulatory functions.