I think you need to have both. Risk management should be taken into consideration the entire process, but the final approval should be done by different people in risk management. This makes me think of quality teams. They are involved in the process, and they give the final approval (maybe a different person than before). It is more important to have a separate team to ensure that bias is not involved in decision making. However, it is a good thing to have people checking in throughout the process to ensure that you save time from going down the wrong path and backtracking.

Does anyone else have personal experience with this?