Is the sky or the earth the limit? Risk, uncertainty and nature

Abstract

Dealing with uncertainty has become a matter of great concern for policy makers and scientific research in a world facing global, epochal and complex changes. But in essence, you cannot entirely predict the future. This article aims at conceptualizing the limits to anticipate the future – or what is often referred as the substitution of risk for uncertainty. In contrast to most theories examining risk and uncertainty, we start from the assumption that there are limits in the substitution of risk for uncertainty and that distinguishing between ontological and epistemic levels of analysis helps clarify such limits. The paper makes two arguments: first, most approaches see no ontological and/or epistemic limit in the substitution of risk for uncertainty; second, the pluralization of science is the only way to cope with limits in substituting risk for uncertainty. This second argument draws on the assumption that accounting for the uncertainty of the future depends on knowledge production processes able to overcome disciplinary boundaries and better include lay and expert knowledge. In times of great concerns regarding mitigation and adaptation to the ecological crisis, we illustrate our arguments with insights from global environmental governance.

Keywords:

• Environment
• expertise
• global governance
• measurement
• ontology
• pluralization of science
• risk management
• uncertainty

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for the support from the Institut d’Etudes Politique of the University of Lausanne, which made possible to present preliminary versions of this paper in several workshops and conferences. The project was also part of an experimental collaborative work between teachers and students during the first year of their two-year MA in political science at the University of Lausanne. We thank Etienne Furrer, Emma Sofia Lunghi, Marc Monthoux and Céline Yousefzai for their unique involvement in that experience. We would also like to thank François Allisson, Valérie Boisvert, Thomas David, Katarzyna Gruszka, Oliver Kessler, Harro Maas, Lucile Maertens, Yannick Perticone and Manuel Scholz-Waeckerle for helpful comments, suggestions and criticisms on previous versions of this paper. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable and challenging feedbacks on previous versions of this paper. All remaining errors are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are well aware that theories discussed in this article do not exhaust accounts on risk and uncertainty in social sciences. They only account for what we see as the most relevant interdisciplinary and pluralist corpus for the puzzle of risk and uncertainty in IPE debates.

2 Insurance losses from natural disasters were estimated at 219 billions of US dollars between 2017 and 2018, ‘the highest-ever for a two-year period’ (Swiss Re Institute, 2019).

3 We are aware that the distinction between mainstream and heterodox has fed much debates without necessary much clarity about the criteria defining one or the other (Jo et al., 2018). It includes at its core neoclassical orthodoxy, but also extends to behavioral economics and with some variations, a number of other schools of thought (for further details, see: Dobusch & Kapeller, 2012).

4 Costanza and his colleagues who did the first global monetary assessment of nature’s value used a discount rate of 5% in order to convert stock values into annual flows. Such a rate of conversion was crucial to reach the final figure of 33 trillion of US dollars for the annual services provided by ecosystems for human beings. This is slightly more than Nordhaus’ average 4.3% used in his modelling, and clearly more than Stern (2006) in his review of the economics of climate change, using a discount rate of 1%.

5 In the same vein, Ericson (2005, p. 660) points out that ‘Beck should have called it the uncertain society because his focus is on potential and actual scientific and technological disasters that have proven unpredictable and entail immeasurable human suffering’.

6 See the forthcoming special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics provisionally entitled ‘Keynes’ Treatise on Probability and Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit After 100 Years’ (Editors: Phil Faulkner, Alberto Feduzi, C.R. McCann, Jr, Jochen Runde).

7 The whole quote is the following: ‘By “uncertain” knowledge […] I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty; nor is the prospect of a Victory bond being drawn. Or, again, the expectation of life is only slightly uncertain. Even the weather is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which 1am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters, there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know” (J. M. Keynes, 1937, pp. 213–214).

8 To some degree, he could even be related to the heterodox approaches in international political economy and sociology seen above, since no ontological limits seem likely to arise in such transformation of uncertainty into risk.

9 John R. Commons’ concept of ‘futurity’ would also deserve further analysis in the wake of his observations that ‘man lives in the future but acts in the present’ (1934, p. 58). Basically, Commons sees no epistemic limit if rights – or ‘the collective working rules of society’ – are properly negotiated between the parties concerned to provide a ‘security of expectation’. The recent best-seller co-authored by Mervyn King, former Governor of the Bank of England, reaches somehow similar conclusions in considering that eventually creative business, political and personal strategies are better than number to cope with radical uncertainty (Kay & King, 2020).

10 The official aim of the IPBES is to provide Governments, the private sector, and civil society with scientifically credible and independent up-to-date assessments of available knowledge to make informed decisions at the local, regional and international levels.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Sylvain Maechler

Sylvain Maechler is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in international political economy at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques of the University of Lausanne, and member of the Centre d’Histoire Internationale et d’Etudes Politiques de la Mondialisation (CRHIM). He is also a guest researcher at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on the governance of capitalism in the face of ecological crises, with a special interest on international standardisation, risk management, the politics of quantification and environmental accounting.

Jean-Christophe Graz

Jean-Christophe Graz is Professor of international relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP) of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and co-founder of the Centre d’Histoire Internationale et d’Etudes Politiques de la Mondialisation (CRHIM). His research focuses on global political economy, regulation, transnational private governance, international standards, service offshoring, and more recently on labour and sustainability standards, risk and uncertainty, and the transformations of contemporary capitalism. His most recent book is The Power of Standards: Hybrid authority and the Globalisation of Services (Cambridge University Press, 2019 – Open Access).