Industrial Risk Prevention between (a lot of) Technocracy and (little) Democracy
Résumé
The definition of risk is particularly important, since risk entails uncertain and disputed knowledge (Beck 1992). This is particularly true in risk policymaking, which cannot be considered as the result of inherent properties of substances and activities and is the outcome of a construction process (Borraz 2008) that involves risk definition, framing and sensemaking. More specifically, the activity of defining risk in prevention (that involves naming, selecting and categorizing) has important consequences in the inclusion and exclusion of actors, in acknowledging some types of expertise and not others, in allocating resources, leading to procedures that can have more or less efficacy and legitimacy, thus resulting in various degrees of technocracy or democracy.