Infrastructures of risk: a mapping approach towards controversies on risks

Abstract

Anyone concerned about food risks related, for example, to acrylamide, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or food supplements is confronted with vast and complex landscapes of political debates, with various uncertainties, contested responsibilities, competing knowledge and ambivalent value‐making. In risk assessment procedures, these fluid complexities often get simplified to come to any evaluation at all. A retrospective review of risk scandals, however, highlights that most risks arise just from those connections in production, usage and disposal which remained unseen or were even blinded out during previous risk assessment. To better deal with these ‘unknown unknowns’, society at large and decision‐makers in particular need not only new strategies to avoid manufactured uncertainties but also more comprehensive knowledge tools and concepts to fully explore potential sources and connections of hazards, risks and uncertainties. Facing this challenge of risk governance, the paper discusses the potential of the visualisation (‘mapping’) of risk controversies and introduces the concept of ‘risk infrastructures’. The aim is to equip stakeholders, laypersons and decision‐makers with risk mappings which make visible how competing knowledge claims, protagonists, institutional settings, facts and values are related to each other. It will do so in referring to a prototype software application of such a ‘re‐assembling strategy’ (Actor‐Network‐Theory (ANT)) called ‘Risk Cartography’.

Keywords:

• risks
• visualisation
• mapping
• risk governance
• ANT

Notes

1. Referring to the underlying concepts of ‘Actor‐Network‐Theory’ (ANT; cf. Latour 2005a; Law and Hassard 1999), we choose the term ‘entities’ to immediately clarify that we will not distinguish between human and non‐human elements in risk networks, but we assume that all elements enrolled can act and interact, and are part of the continuous making and re‐making of risks and risk control. Against the background of ANT, risks can be considered as those invisible ‘quasi‐objects’ which are the strictly relational and historical products of actor‐networks and which only become visible once a network breaks down and the search for responsibility starts distinguishing decision‐makers and those affected by the decisions made (Luhmann 2005, chap. 6).

2. ‘Risk Cartography’ as a risk mapping tool was developed within the transdisciplinary project ‘Risk Controversies Visualised’ funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and has been the object of further investigations as part of the EU‐funded project ‘Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics – MACOSPOL’. The Project ‘Risk‐Controversies Visualised’ has been funded within the social–ecological research programme and been coordinated by Stefan Böschen, Cordula Kropp and Jens Soentgen. Since 2008 it has been linked to the EU‐financed project MACOSPOL (macospol.org) coordinated by Bruno Latour (Sciences Po Paris).

3. See, for example, http://www.bfr.bund.de/cd/945.

4. For an ambitious collection, see http://www.mappingcontroversies.net.

5. Risk cartographies can be explored by visiting the link: http://www.risk-cartography.org.