Can Public Distrust of Risk Regulators Be Overcome? An Analysis of the Prospects of Combining Democratic and Expert Elements in Public Decision-Making on Risks to Restore the Political Authority of Risk Managers

This paper deals with the problem of increasing public distrust of political decision-makers and experts, resulting from concerns about their competence as well as their democratic legitimacy and authority. This problem is of specific importance to risk management – a technical governance field with high distributive implications – where “risk regulators” are frequently accused of lacking sufficient competence, democratically legitimized authority, or both. Hence, one of the main challenges taken up in the contemporary risk management literature is to find solutions to overcome this lack of public trust in risk managers and restore their political authority. This paper discusses three of these solutions, or approaches, that currently receive a lot of attention in the risk management literature: participatory risk management, risk management through network-governance and risk management through the regulatory state model. Using a theoretical framework in which we distinguish between input, throughput, output and accountability aspects of political decision-making, we analyse how the approaches seek to combine democratic and expert elements in the organization of decision-making on risks. Based on this analysis, we argue that that due to its regulatory nature some form of expert-based authority will be inevitable in risk management, but that in democratic societies it is essential that the loss of democratic input legitimacy that results from this transfer of governing responsibilities to non-elected “expert-actors” is at least partly overcome by placing additional democratic requirements on other aspects of the decision-making process in which these actors operate, i.e. on throughput (network governance) or on accountability (regulatory state) aspects. However, this brings to light a trade-off between enhancing democratic throughput and enhancing democratic accountability. We demonstrate the implications of this trade-off in a case study on American flood risk management in the context of Hurricane Katrina.