Coping with Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Risk Governance: A Synthesis

The etymology of the term dates back to the Ancient Greek times (Kjaer 2004; Halachmi 2005). Plato used the term “kuberman” as a reference to leadership, which assimilated in Latin to “gubernanre”. This notion evaluated along various trajectories. Next to English, it is part of, among others, the French, Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary.

The possible range of governance has been often termed provocatively as “Governance by government”, “governance with government” and “governance without government” (Rosenau 1992, 1995), which emphasizes the decreasing role of the nation state.

With ambiguity, we refer to the plurality of legitimate viewpoints for evaluating decision outcomes and justifying judgements about their tolerability and acceptability. So ambiguity refers to the existence of multiple values and perspectives. The word “ambiguity” has different meanings in the English language. The term as it is used here was first coined in the 2005 IRGC risk governance framework.

Some like-minded authors prefer to re-conceptualize risk in a way that renders the addition “uncertain” superfluous. For example, Aven and Renn (2009) suggest to redefine risk as a reference to “uncertainty about and severity of the consequences (or outcomes) of an activity with respect to something that humans value”. See also Rosa (2003). We agree with such definitions and we use them as well. In this paper, we, however, prefer to highlight the element of uncertainty, because in our view the deep acknowledgement of uncertainty is one of the major shifts compared to what has been referred to as the positivist, modernist or Knightian risk paradigm. So the use of the notion “uncertain risk” in this paper should be understood as a way to underscore the importance of uncertainty in risk governance.