The Social Negotiation of Risk

The prevention of risk and the necessary protection against its consequences require a sound scientific and technical approach that may only be achieved once all stakeholders mutually agree on the means to be used. Those means depend on a social structure that relies on their accessibility and on the nature of the risks that society is ready to assume. Such a structure raises a series of different questions, all with various connotations: Technical: Do we have solutions to prevent risk and limit its consequences? Scientific: What do we know about risk and to what extent is it possible to foresee an event and its potential consequences? Economical: What financial means can we allocate to risk prevention? Insurance: What types of risk may be covered? Political and ethical: What is the significance of the community concerned? What types of risk are acceptable? Legal: What liabilities stand with regard to risk prevention and protection? Societal and political: What process needs to be adopted? In a democracy, who may hold the responsibility to decide on behalf of the population? Any approach that would restrict unduly any of those parameters would lead inevitably to a series of contentions resulting from neglected aspects - and eventually to failure. That explains why several projects had to be abandoned or rejected in recent decades, simply because of insufficient consultation or interaction. The third phase involves qualitative and quantitative predictions of impacts on relevant targets (human beings, ecosystem, industrial or capital goods). After adopting a probabilistic approach (hierarchisation of causes according to more or less probabilistic scenarios) and rating effects on a severity scale, the assessment may proceed with the fourth phase where risks are evaluated, rated and categorised based on acceptable thresholds that lie at the core of the social negotiation. Once the risk assessment is over, the risk manager is able to take preventive, protective and monitoring measures that are relevant to reduce the actual risks