14-1190b-innovation-managing-risk-evidence

eference to an externally imposed concept of technical,
psychological or culturally determined ‘risk’. During the
2001 UK foot and mouth epidemic, for example, local
people in the affected areas in marginal rural communities
often understood the risk of transmission in terms of the
geographical relationships between infected and uninfected
farms, which in turn depended upon their knowledge of
local geographical features. When those understandings did
not correspond with the quarantine zones around infected
farms as defined by the culling policy devised centrally
in London, it generated considerable mistrust in risk
management and the authorities 33 .
Interpretive approaches share considerable common
ground with more psychologically-based approaches to
perceptions and risk communication design, based upon
the mental models technique 34 , while a recent development
in this area is the use of more biographical and narrative
approaches to understand risk perceptions, risk framing and
risk valuation 35, 36 . The interpretive approach also forms the
foundation for much of the work documenting the social
amplification of risk — the idea that both risk controversies,
and conversely situations where risk perceptions become
attenuated, emerge and are sustained by the dynamics of
institutional and media actors who process, transforming
and shape our collective understandings of risk.
A recent example of risk amplification comes from the
CASE STUDY
TELLING THE STORIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Esther Eidinow (University of Nottingham), Nicky Marsh (University
of Southampton) and Patricia Waugh (University of Durham)
98
“Please don’t tell me how the story ends”
(Cormac McCarthy, The Road)
One of the most powerful narrative images for climate
change is that of the urban apocalypse: Manhattan
submerged by snow or rain. These familiar narratives,
predicting and often preventing disaster, rehearse the
conditions of contemporary agency in situations of
risk. They make technocratic knowledge accessible
and personal: the risk analyst saves his girlfriend, the
scientist his son. The subjunctive qualities of narrative
also structure time, exploring and modifying the
causalities between past, present and future that
risk analysis requires. Popular narratives of disaster,
informed by the certainty of their ending, structurally
both enact and contain the uncertainties of risk.
Yet the dramatic scale of these apocalyptic texts also
makes the agency that they produce seem implausible.
The ability to prevent the apocalypse is the preserve
of the hero, and some of the clichés of contemporary
fiction can threaten the very agency they appear to
enable, because they encourage us to identify with
the effects but not with the solutions to the crisis.
This summer, as ‘cli-fi’ went viral, and stories about
climate change and its effect multiplied across different
media, the New York Times on 29 July 2014 asked the
key question: “Will Fiction Influence How We React to
Climate Change?”
Hollywood aims to thrill us, but the realities of
climate change require a different kind of story-telling.
The mobilizing effect of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book
Silent Spring has been widely touted, but narrative’s
role in comprehending the extraordinarily complex
social and environmental challenges of the moment
go beyond a mere call to action. Recent interdisciplinary
research across narratology and the cognitive sciences
has shown that human cognition functions not just in a
logico-empirical mode, but inherently draws on narrative
structures to make sense of the world and to understand
how it is embedded in an environment that it helps to
construct. Think about the kind of cognitive workout we get
from reading complex novels attentively: we are educated
out of confirmation bias, required to revise hypotheses in
the light of new evidence, consider multiple perspectives,
note the agency of metaphors in reorganizing the real, and
understand our errors as unexpected perspectives emerge
towards a hoped-for convergence with an already-written
ending (which never turns out to be quite what we’d
expected). Narrative is more than a means of escaping from
or mirroring situations of change — it is a powerful and
effective style of thinking through risk and complexity. After
all, there is no narrative without change and surprise.
The discipline of planning has long recognized that
narrative presents a powerful tool for describing complex
future challenges, such as climate change, where multiple
uncertainties preclude simple linear predictions. This is
reflected in the increasing use of scenarios for planning,
both around climate change itself and related challenges
(including food security, land planning, and water sourcing).
Such stories can allow technical information to be made
comprehensible in terms of lived experience, and help to
develop a context of shared understanding for decisionmaking.
But perhaps most importantly, they can offer a
method for exploring possibilities: in place of finished
narratives, story-telling as a dynamic and creative process
can invite engagement and encourage a sense of agency.
But who will tell these stories? Building long-term capacity
for collaborative decision-making faces the challenge