Risk and governance Part 1: The discourses of climate change

JUST OVER A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO TWO SEMINAL PAPERS ON risk were published: Chauncey Starr's 'Social Benefit Versus Technological Risk'(1) and Mary Douglas's 'Environments At Risk'.(2) The former insisted on the fundamental distinction between objective risk and perceived risk; the latter argued that there is often no valid way of drawing that distinction. In the United States, the National Academy of Sciences has consistently held to the objective/perceived distinction (until the last year or so) and the same has been true of Britain's Royal Society (until last year). Over the intervening years, and regardless of how many mattresses (in the form of handbooks and reports from august committees and working groups) were piled on top of one another, Mary Douglas's pea still rubbed its way through. Hence the very recent switch on both sides of the Atlantic.(3) The last mattress-piling effort, in Britain, was in 1992,(4) when the Royal Society set out to re-work its handbook of ten years before.(5) Its launch was not a successful event.