RISK-DISASTER-AND-INSURANCE

ArticlesOnline Exclusives Questioning World Risk Society: Three Challenges for Research on the Governance of Uncertainty By Fabrizio Cantelli, Naonori Kodate, Kristian Krieger The concept of the World Risk Society (Beck, 1998) is often associated with major disasters and accidents. And indeed, safety from the forces of nature can no longer be taken for granted even by the population of industrialised countries, as an increasing number of floods, hurricanes and winter storms over the last two decades demonstrates. Similarly, industrial accidents, such as Chernobyl, Sandoz and Bhopal, cause severe and lasting damages to human health and the environment (Perrow, 1999). In view of accelerating technological change and increased competitive pressures, as well as climate change, it is reasonable to expect that such disasters will continue to undermine the safety of the population and commentators will keep on referring to the idea of a 'risk society'. While the association of the concept of a risk society with disasters is not wrong, it is incomplete. Developed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the mid-1980s (1991, 1995, 1996, 1998), the idea of an emergent risk society refers to a fundamental transformation or modernisation of industrial societies. More specifically, increasingly individualised and disembedded citizens question - partly in view of the devastating consequences of industrial production - the very foundations of the society, most notably the belief in economic growth, and political, technological and scientific control of production. This 'questioning' of the foundations results in 'reflexive modernisation'.

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Recent decades of globalisation have created a more interconnected, interdependent and complex world than ever witnessed before. While global policy has focused on facilitating integration, the implications of growing interdependence have been largely ignored. While the acceleration in global integration has brought many benefits, it has also created fragility through the underlying production of new kinds of systemic risks. The paper conceptualises systemic risk in the 21st Century and examines the challenges it poses to global governance regimes. The 2008-2009 financial crisis illustrates the failure of even sophisticated global institutions to manage the underlying forces of systemic risk, and this is symptomatic of institutional failure to keep pace with globalisation. The lessons from the financial crisis highlight the real threat of systemic risk to other 21st Century challenges, but more importantly, they expose the profound shortcomings of global institutions to manage global systemic risks in the future. The failure of the most developed and best-equipped global governance system, finance, to recognize or manage the new vulnerabilities associated with globalisation in the 21st Century highlights the scale and urgency of the challenge.  Policy Implications The rise of systemic risk requires a systemic response. Effective global governance and policy development has never been so necessary and urgent. The financial crisis illustrated that current global financial institutions are inadequate in their policy response to systemic risk and cannot keep pace with innovation and increasing system complexity in global finance. Deeper structural changes are required, including with respect to regulatory reforms. The institutional rigidity and profound shortcomings of global institutions applies not only to global finance, but to other looming systemic risks in the future. Neither the current global governance system, nor the planned reforms, meets the test of addre

Frontiers in the economics of environmental regulation and liability Por Marcel Boyer,Yolande Hiriart,David Martimort é um livro que dar bem a conta do recado, a despeito da sua forte ênfase na modelagem matemática e seu tratamento fraco dos aspectos legais .

Apprivoiser les catastrophes Pourquoi consacrer un numéro aux risques quand les publications se multiplient sur cette question ? Jocelyne DuboisMaury et Claude Chaline en particulier dressent un panorama quasi exhaustif de tous les risques naturels dont l'espace urbain est menacé, et des différentes mesures légales prévues pour l'en préserver. Mais qu'a voulu dire Ulrich Beck en parlant de « société du risque », et que cherchent à évoquer ceux qui comme Anthony Giddens en GrandeBretagne ou JeanPierre Dupuy en France lui ont emboîté le pas ? De grands corps d'ingénieurs, celui des Ponts et Chaussées et celui des Mines, ont évité aux Français depuis le XVIII e siècle de se poser ce genre de question. Le corps des Ponts et Chaussées s'est constitué pour entraver tout ce qui nuisait à la circulation des personnes et des marchandises, en utilisant la main d'oeuvre au chômage dans les campagnes. D'emblée il s'est mis en travers des risques d'atteinte à l'ordre public et c'est ce qui a fait son succès. Quant au corps des Mines il s'est distingué en calculant des machines qui diminuaient le risque d'accident tout en améliorant le rendement. Dès le Siècle des lumières l'État se constitue comme gestionnaire d'une « société du risque » où la prévention des aléas joue un rôle moteur dans l'amélioration des choses. De travaux en travaux cette amélioration devient tout à fait réelle. L'évolution de la norme est éclairante à ce sujet. C'est ainsi que la circulaire Caquot en 1949 invite à dimensionner les égouts de façon que la crue centennale soit avalée en une heure. Les égouts de Paris sont capables de cette performance. La construction des villes nouvelles est l'occasion de découvrir que cette norme, inappliquée par la plupart des villes de province, est inapplicable financièrement en ÎledeFrance également. Des solutions fort élégantes sont trouvées en allant chercher des i

Jacques Lolive CONFIGURATIONS, PRISES ET PROPOSITIONS Le risque provient de l'instabilité des choses ou des systèmes qui engagent la vie humaine. La perception du danger ne porte pas tant sur les propriétés en soi de l'objet de la menace que sur les prises qu'il offre à l'imagination et à la raison. Ces prises constituent autant de propositions pratiques où s'enchevêtrent des mobilisations politiques, des recherches scientifiques et des dispositifs de mise en confiance.

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The environmental responsibility of business is to increase its profits (by creating value within the bounds of private property rights)\n\nPierre Desrochers\nProponents of corporate social responsibility (CSR) typically consider "business as usual" unsustainable. Building on historical evidence that long predates the modern environmental movement, the contrary case is made that the interplay of voluntary exchange, private property rights, and self-interest has generally resulted in the so-called "triple bottom line" (economic, social, and environmental) through more efficient use of materials and the continual creation of higher quality resources. However, because market processes continually eliminate less competitive firms and tend to concentrate business activities geographically, political pressure brought to bear by adversely affected vested interests often results in the creation of policies that cause greater environmental harm than would otherwise be evident. Environmental CSR proponents often misinterpret these government failures as market failures, and characteristically advocate policies that further distract firms from their core objective and resulting triple bottom line. The article concludes by arguing that the most promising path toward truly sustainable development lies in the unwavering pursuit of profitability within the bounds of well-defined and enforced private property rights

Globalization has made the protection of human rights and the prevention of violations of these rights more complex in recent years. This article reviews a book that challenges the current 'wisdom' of human rights obligations that almost uniquely focus on the behaviour of states in relation to their own populations. The focus of this review is the concept of 'shared responsibility' for human rights protection that is an essential topic of the book. It assesses the call for responsibility for those states with the power to influence structures in the international community that perpetrate poverty and human rights violations on a large scale