Technocratic Regulation: Coping with Risk and Uncertainty

The chapter focuses on changes in technocratic rationality and practice brought about by risk society. The proliferation of manufactured, global and incalculable risk has undercut the traditional security thinking of industrial technocracy and led to the internalization of risk and a new credo announcing the impossibility of insurance against dangers and uncertainty. This has, in turn, prompted important changes in technocratic risk regulation and a new focus on the creation and management of resilient citizens, organizations, communities, societies and systems. Ecological and economic governance are discussed as examples of this development.