|
|
 |
Short courses masters
Risk and Uncertainty
27 October - 21 November
Workload: 40 hours per week
Faculty: Prof. Dr. M. van Asselt
Assessment: written exam
Content and objectives
Risk and uncertainty are important features of modern life. Our current society is increasingly referred to as risk society, a notion coined by the sociologist Ulrich Beck. “How to deal with uncertainty and risk?” is a salient question, not only for policy makers, decision-makers in business and their advisors and societal actors as the environmental movements, but for all individuals managing their way through life.
In this course the aim is to advance an interdisciplinary perspective on risk governance. The course will benefit from input from social sciences, law and economics. This will enable students to understand uncertainty and risk on the level of an individual (households, consumers), i.e. the micro-level, as well as to study it from a societal, governance perspective, i.e. the macro-level. The cases addressed in the course will range from classical health risks to new environmental risks, from investment funds to social security, from insurances issues to risks associated with new technology and products. The major objective is to advance understanding of important governance issues pertaining to uncertainty and risk in a public policy context.
The aim of the course is to raise a critical and reflexive understanding as a basis to really think about risk governance. To that end, the students have to familiarize themselves with current contributions to debates on uncertainty and risk, which they will discuss with experts. It is important that they gain an understanding of how such theoretical understanding can be used 1) to reflect on current decision-making and regulatory practices and 2) to develop alternative approaches.
Literature
- Löfstedt, R. E. (2005). Risk management in post-trust societies, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York, USA.
- Adams, J. (1995). Risk, UCL Press, London, UK
- Beck, U. (1986). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, London, UK.
- Bernstein, P. L. (1996). Against the gods: The remarkable story of risk, John Wiley & Sons, New York, USA.
- Harremoës, P., Gee, D., MacGarvin, M., Stirling, A., Keys, J., Wynne, B., Guedes Vaz, S. (2002) The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings. Earthscan, London.
- Health Council of the Netherlands. (2006). “Executive summary Health significance of nanotechnologies.” 2006/06, Health Council of the Netherlands, The Hague, the Netherlands. (p. 19 – 28 of report in Dutch “Betekenis van nanotechnologieën voor gezondheid”).
- Huitema, D., Hazardous decisions: Hazardous waste siting in the UK, the Netherlands and Canada. Institutions and Discourses. 2002, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
- Jasanoff, S. (2005). Designs on Nature: Science and democracy in Europe and the United States, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
- Mourik, R. (2004). "Did water kill the cows? The distribution and democratisation of risk, responsibility and liability in a Dutch agricultural controversy on water pollution and cattle sickness," PhD, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
- O'Riordan, T., Cameron, J., and Jordan, A. (2001). Reinterpreting the Precautionary Principle, Cameron May International Law & Policy, London UK.
- Renn, O. (2006). "Risk Governance: Towards an integrative approach." IRGC White Paper No 1, International Risk Governance Council (IRGC), Geneva, Switzerland.
- Walker, G., P. Simmons, A. Irwin, and B. Wynne, Risk communication, public participation and the Seveso II directive. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 1999
- Wynne, B. (1982). Rationality and Ritual: The Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain, British Society for the History of Science, Chalfont, St. Giles
- Beck, U. (1992). "From Industrial Society to the Risk Society: Questions of survival, social structure and ecological enlightenment." Theory, Culture and Society, 9(1)
- Borrás, S., Legitimate governance of risk at the EU level? The case of genetically modified organisms. Technological forecasting and social change, 2006. 73(1)
- Brown, P., McCormick, S., Mayer, B., Zavestoski, S., Morello-Frosch, R., Gasior Altman, R., and Senier, L. (2006). “A Lab of Our Own”: Environmental causation of breast cancer and challenges to the dominant epidemiological paradigm.” Science, Technology & Human Values, 31(5), 499 - 536.
- Funtowicz, S. O., and Ravetz, J. R. (1992). “Risk Management as a Postnormal Science.” Risk Analysis, 12(1), 95-97.
- Hoffmann-Riem, H. and B. Wynne, In risk assessment, one has to admit ignorance. Nature, 2002. 416 (14 March)
- Jasanoff, S. (1993). "Bridging the two cultures of risk analysis." Risk Analysis, 13(2)
- Klinke, A., and Renn, O. (2002). "A new approach to risk evaluation and management: Risk-based, precaution-based, and discourse-based strategies." Risk Analysis, 22(6)
- Thompson, K. M., Deisler, P. F., and Schwing, R. C. (2005). "Interdisciplinary vision: The first 25 years of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), 1980-2005." Risk analysis, 25(6)
- Tickner, J., and Gouveia-Vigeant, T. (2005). "The 1991 Cholera Epidemic in Peru: Not a case of precaution gone awry." Risk Analysis, 25(3)
- Uggla, Y. (2004). "Risk and safety analysis in long-term perspective." Futures, 36(5)
- Van Asselt, M. B. A. (2005). "The complex significance of uncertainty in a risk era: Logics, manners and strategies in use." International Journal for Risk Assessment and Management, 5(2/3/4)
- Van Asselt, M. B. A., and Vos, E. (2006 (in press)). "The precautionary principle and the uncertainty paradox." Journal for Risk Research, 9(4).
- Wells Bedsworth, L., Lowenthal, M. D., and Kastenberg, W. E. (2004). "Uncertainty and regulation: The rhetoric of risk in the California low-level radioactive waste debate." Science, Technology & Human Values, 29(3)
|
|
Application details
Application form
short courses
Application and fees
Scholarships |
