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Structure, Process, and Agency in the Evaluation of Risk Governance

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Abstract

Risk governance is an approach adopted to understand and comprehensively handle the complexity of the decision-making processes involved in risk production and reduction. In this chapter, it is argued that the evaluation of risk governance may go beyond the measurement of performance and advancement in disaster risk reduction—it can also act to increase social learning and risk awareness, to reach consensus over the equitable distribution of risks and to negotiate a preferred level of risk. Thus, participatory evaluation is proposed to increase the exchange and sharing of the different concerns, knowledges, interests, and values of societal players. Finally, an evaluation framework based on a mixed hierarchical and networked structure of criteria, components, and the dimensions of risk governance is advanced to complete the evaluation system. In this framework, criteria should measure not just policy development but also organizational structure, as well as the role of societal actors and the intervention of formal and informal arrangements.

For character too is a process and an unfolding.

(George Eliot, Middlemarch)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.designforalleurope.org/Design-for-All/EIDD-Documents/Stockholm-Declaration/.

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Acknowledgement

Copy editing of this chapter has been made possible with the financial support of the Government of Extremadura and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the grant GR10071 awarded to the research group on Geospatial Engineering and Urban Heritage of the University of Extremadura.

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    Urbano Fra.Paleo

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Fra.Paleo, U. (2015). Structure, Process, and Agency in the Evaluation of Risk Governance. In: Fra.Paleo, U. (eds) Risk Governance. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9328-5_14

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