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Evidence and analysis - The discursive model

6 important questions on Evidence and analysis - The discursive model

How is risk analysis seen from the discursive apporach

Risk analysis, according to this approach, is first and foremost a specialized language -- in formal terms, a discourse -- that serves to allocate power in society. In particular, the decision to frame environmental problems in quantitative terms, through QRA, rules out other ways of classifying and measuring harms to the environment; risk-talk implicitly empowers certain people as experts, and their knowledge as expertise, and excludes other people and their knowledge as incompetent or irrelevant.

What are the three determinants of QRA

Causation
Agency
Uncertainty

In a world of quantitative risk assessment, how is causation viewed?

as a linear and mechanistic phenomenon.

How is the agency analysis viewed in the discursive model?

By focusing on material agents as the primary sources of risk, QRA tends to diminish our perception of human agency and responsibility. Implicit in this mode of analysis is the notion that risk originates in the inanimate world

What is the consequence of the agency determinant?

that research on risk centers around issues of concern to mathematical modelers rather than to social scientists more broadly.

Why can quantitative techniques be deeply misleading?

Comparative 37'38 and historical 39 work on risk has shown that, even when societies use quantitative analysis to further public policy, they differ in how they classify and measure natural phenomena, which techniques they label as objective or reliable, how they characterize uncertainty, and what resources they apply to its reduction

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The political science of risk perception

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