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Coping with Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Risk Governance: A Synthesis

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Abstract

The term governance describes the multitude of actors and processes that lead to collectively binding decisions. The term risk governance translates the core principles of governance to the context of risk-related policy making. We aim to delineate some basic lessons from the insights of the other articles in this special issue for our understanding of risk governance. Risk governance provides a conceptual as well as normative basis for how to cope with uncertain, complex and/or ambiguous risks. We propose to synthesize the breadth of the articles in this special issue by suggesting some changes to the risk governance framework proposed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) and adding some insights to its analytical and normative implications.

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Notes

  1. The etymology of the term dates back to the Ancient Greek times (Kjaer 2004; Halachmi 2005). Plato used the term “kuberman” as a reference to leadership, which assimilated in Latin to “gubernanre”. This notion evaluated along various trajectories. Next to English, it is part of, among others, the French, Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary.

  2. The possible range of governance has been often termed provocatively as “Governance by government”, “governance with government” and “governance without government” (Rosenau 1992, 1995), which emphasizes the decreasing role of the nation state.

  3. With ambiguity, we refer to the plurality of legitimate viewpoints for evaluating decision outcomes and justifying judgements about their tolerability and acceptability. So ambiguity refers to the existence of multiple values and perspectives. The word “ambiguity” has different meanings in the English language. The term as it is used here was first coined in the 2005 IRGC risk governance framework.

  4. Some like-minded authors prefer to re-conceptualize risk in a way that renders the addition “uncertain” superfluous. For example, Aven and Renn (2009) suggest to redefine risk as a reference to “uncertainty about and severity of the consequences (or outcomes) of an activity with respect to something that humans value”. See also Rosa (2003). We agree with such definitions and we use them as well. In this paper, we, however, prefer to highlight the element of uncertainty, because in our view the deep acknowledgement of uncertainty is one of the major shifts compared to what has been referred to as the positivist, modernist or Knightian risk paradigm. So the use of the notion “uncertain risk” in this paper should be understood as a way to underscore the importance of uncertainty in risk governance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department for Social Sciences V, University of Stuttgart, Seidenstr. 36, 70174, Stuttgart, Germany

    Ortwin Renn

  2. Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Domain of ETH), Ueberlandstr. 133, 8600, Duebendorf, Switzerland

    Andreas Klinke

  3. Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Technology and Society Studies, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Marjolein van Asselt

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  1. Ortwin Renn
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Renn, O., Klinke, A. & van Asselt, M. Coping with Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Risk Governance: A Synthesis. AMBIO 40, 231–246 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-010-0134-0

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