Department of Safety, Economics, and Planning, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway.
Risk Anal. 2023 Mar;43(3):433-439. doi: 10.1111/risa.13936. Epub 2022 May 1.
Policies on risk constitute a core topic of risk analysis and risk science, and it is common at risk conferences to present real-life cases of such policies, for example related to the handling of climate change and pandemics. Although these are of broad interest, showing how important issues in society are dealt with, it can be questioned to what extent and how these cases contribute to enhancing risk analysis and risk science. The present paper addresses this concern. It is argued that, in order to learn from the cases, they need in general to be more thoroughly followed up with discussions of concepts, principles, approaches, and methods for assessing, characterizing, communicating and handling risk. Describing a governmental policy on, for example, the handling of COVID-19 is a point of departure for interesting discussions concerning its justification and performance, in particular in relation to risk and the most updated knowledge from the risk analysis field. Such discussions are, however, often lacking. The paper points to some key obstacles and challenges for the learning process, including the difficulty of distinguishing between policies, policy analysis, and politics.
政策风险构成风险分析和风险科学的核心议题，在风险会议上经常展示此类政策的实际案例，例如与气候变化和大流行病的处理有关的案例。尽管这些案例引起了广泛关注，展示了社会上重要问题的处理方式，但人们不禁要问，这些案例在多大程度上以及如何有助于加强风险分析和风险科学。本文针对这一问题进行了探讨。文章认为，为了从这些案例中吸取经验，通常需要更深入地讨论评估、描述、沟通和处理风险的概念、原则、方法和途径。例如，描述政府对 COVID-19 处理的政策，是就其合理性和绩效展开有趣讨论的起点，特别是在涉及风险和风险分析领域最新知识的情况下。然而，这种讨论往往缺乏。本文指出了学习过程中的一些关键障碍和挑战，包括区分政策、政策分析和政治的困难。
