An RSI Understanding Risk method
Policy surveillance
Policy surveillance is one of the methods used by Risk Sciences International to better understand risk.
Broadly
Policy surveillance involves tracking, coding, and analyzing laws, regulations, or administrative actions relevant to a given risk domain. It supports compliance analysis, cross-jurisdictional comparison, and longitudinal evaluation. Challenges include maintaining up-to-date databases and accounting for implementation gaps versus legal intent.
More specifically
RSI conducts policy surveillance to support clients in environmental regulation, public health law, and product safety. It builds structured inventories, applies classification schemes, and visualizes policy change over time. This method supports RSI’s understanding of the regulatory context in which technical risks are embedded.