The Coming of Age of Risk Governance

Abstract Proposed as an advanced conceptualization of how to handle risk, risk governance begins with the critique and expansion of the traditional idea and standard practices of risk analysis. In developments over the last two decades, proponents of a more integrative approach on governing risks have moved further away from distinct conceptions of risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication and toward the processes and institutions that guide, restrain, and integrate collective activities of handling risk. In early formulations of what risk governance entails, the superiority of the interplay between risk evaluation and risk management over linear and simple deductions from risk assessment to risk management was established precisely by developing a distinctive rationality of how to proceed. Later, the International Risk Governance Council recaptured this distinctive rationality that institutionalized processes should embody the interplay of the assessment of risks and related concerns, their sociopolitical appraisal, and the logical inference for risk management. Recently, this approach has been refined and augmented toward an integrative and adaptive concept of risk governance and toward a postnormal conception of risk governance. Main characteristics are a new concept of differentiated responsibility and deliberation in which expertise, experience, and tacit knowledge are integrated, forming the core of legitimate political risk decision making.