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9 Risk Governance A Synthesis We are more inclined to engage in a risk if we believe that the odds of a truly catastrophic outcome are negligible. — Robert Meyer, “Why We Still Fail to Learn from Disasters” (2010) Beyond Government: The Need for Comprehensive Governance R isk governance, as we defined it in the Introduction, is a broad rubric referring to a complex of coordinating, steering, and regulatory processes conducted for collective decision making involving uncertainty. Risk sets this collection of processes in motion whenever the risk affects multiples of people, collectivities, or institutions. Governance comprises both the institutional structure (formal and informal) and the policy process that guide and restrain collective activities of a group, society, or international community. Its aim is to regulate, reduce, or control risk problems. This chapter addresses each stage of the risk governance process: pre-­ assessment, interdisciplinary risk estimation, characterization and evaluation, management, and communication/participation. Furthermore, we explicate the design of risk communication and participation to address the challenges raised by the three risk characteristics of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity . Finally, this chapter concludes with basic lessons for risk governance. Before beginning those tasks, we identify a fundamental change in the actors now participating in governance. In recent decades, the handling of collectively relevant risk problems has shifted. The shift is from traditional state-centric approaches, with hierarchically organized governmental agencies as the dominant locus of power, to multilevel governance systems, where the political authority for handling risk problems is distributed among separately constituted public bodies (cf. Lidskog 2008; Lidskog et al. 2011; Rosenau 1992; Wolf 2002). These bodies are characterized by overlapping jurisdictions that do not match the traditional hierarchi- Risk Governance 151 cal order of state-centric systems (cf. Hooghe and Marks 2003; Skelcher 2005). They consist of multi-actor alliances that include not only traditional actors such as the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, but also socially relevant actors from civil society. Prominent among those actors are industry, science, and nongovernmental organizations. The result of the governance shift is an increasingly multilayered and diversified sociopolitical landscape . It is a landscape populated by a multitude of actors whose perceptions and evaluations draw on a diversity of knowledge and evidence claims, value commitments, and political interests. Their goal, of course, is to influence processes of risk analysis, decision making, and risk management (Irwin 2008; Jasanoff 2004). Institutional diversity can offer considerable advantages when complex, uncertain , and ambiguous risk problems need to be addressed. First, risk problems that vary in scope can be managed across different institutions or at different levels. Second, an inherent degree of overlap and redundancy makes nonhierarchical adaptive and integrative risk governance systems more resilient and therefore less vulnerable. Third, the larger number of actors facilitates experimentation and learning (Klinke and Renn 2012; Renn 2008c: 177ff.; Renn, Klinke, and van Asselt 2011). There are also disadvantages. They include the possible commodification of risk, the fragmentation of the risk governance process , more costly collective risk decision making, the potential loss of democratic accountability, and paralysis by analysis. The paralysis shows itself in the inability to make decisions due to unresolved cognitive and normative conflicts and lack of accountability vis-à-vis multiple responsibilities and duties (Charnley 2000; Garrelts and Lange 2011; Lyall and Tait 2004). Thus, understanding the dynamics, structures, and functionality of risk governance processes requires a general and comprehensive understanding of procedural mechanisms and structural configurations. The standard model of risk analysis consisting of three components—risk assessment (including identification ), management, and communication—is too narrowly focused on private or public regulatory bodies. It fails to consider the full range of governance actors engaged in processes for governing risk. Furthermore, it ignores stakeholder and public involvement as a core feature in the stage of communication and deliberation, another key element of governance. Despite new attempts to develop new models and frameworks of risk governance , there is still a need to link these conceptual frameworks to actual case studies. Such a link allows us to test past experiences and explore their usefulness for designing more informed and robust risk management strategies (Renn and Walker 2008). As Timo Assmuth (2011:167), a senior researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute, concludes, “With complex risk and riskbenefit issues such as those of Baltic Sea fish [that are threatened not only by overfishing, but also by toxic contaminants], a narrow and rigid assessment and management approach based on illusory certainty and on a sectorized and top-down governance and deliberation style needs...

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