Inclusive risk governance: concepts and application to environmental policy making / Ortwin Renn and Pia-Johanna Schweizer ; Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ

Abstract

The concept of inclusive risk governance is based on a normative belief that the integration of knowledge and values can best be accomplished by involving those actors in the decision making process that are able to contribute all the respective knowledge as well as the variability of values necessary to make effective, efficient, fair and morally acceptable decisions about risk. In the risk arena the major actors are: governments, the economic sector, scientific communities and representatives of civil society. The paper addresses the conceptual issues of how to integrate the contributions of the different actor groups in risk governance. Who and what is or should be included in the deliberations and how is closure accomplished or can be reached in such settings? The main thesis in the paper is that these two questions can only be answered in the context of six underlying concepts of deliberation in democratic societies.