Humanity at Risk: The Need for Global Governance.

• Author: Alley, Roderic
• Position: Book review

Humanity at Risk: The Need for Global Governance

Editors: Daniel Innerarity and Javier Solaner

Published by: Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2013, 183pp, US$25.99.

This collection of essays is reproduced from a 2010 conference held in Spain under global conditions of heightened vulnerability to economic, physical and terror-inspired risk. The publication is organised into three sections, its fourteen contributions appearing under Global Risks and Risk Society; Representation of Risks; or The Governance of Global Risks. Introducing papers now selectively considered, Daniel Innerarity asks how we evaluate risks, what actions should we recommend, and which precautions are feasible given our ignorance of some future events? He responds by seeing the choice as less between safe or risky alternatives but rather between alternatives that are always risky. Uncertainty has advantages by encouraging the flexibility needed to learn and innovate. A path between full risk aversion and panic-driven recklessness is possible, but it needs the state to act as a pivotal co-operating mechanism given growing demands for a democratisation of risk management and regulatory imperatives stemming not from technological success but its failure.

Ulrich Beck's contribution ('Living in and Coping with a World Risk Society') sees three main reactions to omnipresent risk; denial, apathy and transformation. What is omnipresent is incalculable and beyond compensation. Public discourse about risk flows not from decisions so much as their consequences and uneasy compromises struck between state demands for security and a mass media hungry for catastrophe. For Beck risk is now Janus-faced: as it may empower fresh initiatives and sources of legitimation, it can also cripple them through destabilised global markets and externalisation of risk by financial failures. Modifying that dilemma requires re-negotiation of the rules and assumptions demarcating policy and ethical spaces within national and international spheres of initiative and responsibility.

Edgar Grande believes global risks now require new forms of preventive governance extending beyond the functions and territorial limits of nation states. That requires ground clearing to distinguish new risks of greatly expanded potential damage from natural disasters; between 'real' and 'expected' disasters; and epistemologically between estimates of 'calculable risks' and 'incalculable uncertainty'. Grande's conception of...