The design of policies for risk management in agriculture raises multiple challenges from generating good information on types of risks and tools available to deal with these, to creating incentives to encourage farmers to adopt a pro-active risk management strategy. The design of the institutional framework for the governance of catastrophic risks is crucial to delineate the boundaries of responsibility between farmers, government and other stakeholders. Based on experiences in several OECD countries and analytical work, this chapter provides a set of principles and guidelines for good policy design.