Risk and Public Policy

Risks to Individual and Collective Health

One key consideration over the past 3 decades has been the interest in risk as a result of environmental and technological developments, namely, [Page 2323]the risks to individual and collective health that public policies are supposed to protect against. The field of science and technology studies has considered how organizations deal with uncertainties (potential events to which probabilities cannot be assigned) and risks (potential events to which probabilities can be assigned). Significant attention has been paid to the socially constructed nature of expert decision making, such as regarding the specifications of nuclear reactors or civilian aircraft. Further, there has been significant interest in organizational processes, whether relating to the “normalization of deviance” as part of (interorganizational) processes; the inevitability, as discussed by Charles Perrow (1999), of things going wrong; or the avoidance of such errors in so-called high-reliability organizations. This interest has moved into the field of environmental and civil contingency-related risks, especially given the concern over the impact of climate change (e.g., flooding) and security. A related category of interest has concerned itself with how changing values among the population have led to a growing distrust of large technical systems, especially those associated with risks of catastrophic consequence, for example, nuclear reactors. But attention has not merely been paid to high-tech or catastrophic large-scale risks. In a comparative study of nine risks (e.g., air pollution, dangerous dogs, and pesticides), Christopher Hood, Henry Rothstein, and Robert Baldwin (2001) found significant differences in risk regulation regimes that could not be explained by a purely functional “risk profile” explanation. Related to this, Christopher Hood and Martin Lodge (2005) found institutional similarities in regulatory responses to one particular risk, namely, dog bites in public, across significantly different national institutional contexts. Regardless of the political system, regulatory responses to media pressure in the wake of fatal dog-bite attacks was remarkably similar.

Risk and the Political Process

A second key consideration relates to how actors deal with risk affecting them as part of the political process. Such substantive issues of risk to actors are at the heart of the public policy literature on regulation, in particular regarding the regulation of infrastructures. Here, the key interest is in understanding the institutional conditions that accentuate so-called political risks. In contexts in which developmental outcomes (such as investment in infrastructure modernization and expansion) depend on private investors, as governments lack budgetary resources, private investors will adjust the levels of their investment according to the risk of their being expropriated through administrative-regulatory means. The risk of such expropriation is particularly high following the initial investment in fixed assets (such as infrastructure). As a result, private investors seek regulatory devices that reduce political and regulatory discretion. Therefore, policies need to be devised that reduce administrative discretion in the context of specific political institutional constellations. At the same time, the literature has also been interested in reducing the risk of “capture” and “drift”—that is, the risk that private parties will not fulfill their mandate or rather redirect the goals of regulation away from oversight toward advocacy of their own interests. Following a period in which the literature assumed a near inevitability that “agents” would escape oversight, more recent literature in institutional analysis has pointed to devices to hardwire regulatory regimes in order to reduce problems of political and “private” risks.

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