Regulation and risk today

Risk and regulation have become important organising concepts for a wide variety of public and private actions. The invention of risk as a concept is closely related to wider social ideas based on agency, that we have the capacity to identify the probability of certain adverse events and the harm these are likely to cause should they turn out (Renn 2010). The idea of risk enables us not only to identify and take appropriate actions to prevent the harm arising, but also to use calculations to allow those who share risks (such as harm to property and person arising from motor accidents) to pool their risk through taking out insurance (Ericson, Barry and Doyle 2000). Some public services, notably firefighting, originated as a private mechanism for serving customer of insurance companies and reducing the latter’s exposure, by putting out fires. (Sharman 1991) Major sociological figures such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens have suggested that the period of late modernity which we are living through may be characterised as a ‘risk society’ in the sense that we face and are aware of multitudes of risks which may have a relatively low prospect of turning out, but which may have catastrophic consequences (Ekberg 2007). The tsunami which engulfed the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011 provided a key example. The global financial crisis of 2008- was caused, at least in part, by large numbers of interrelated transactions which generated a hitherto barely noticed ‘systemic risk’ across different classes of financial and non-financial institutions, such that the triggering of one financial action, would then lead to a sequence of further adverse consequences in a range of weakly related market sectors (Harrington 2009).