AFTER FUKUSHIMA: REFLECTIONS ON RISK AND INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING IN AN ERA OF MEGA‐CRISES
| Author | PAUL 't HART |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12021 |
| Published date | 01 March 2013 |
| Date | 01 March 2013 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12021
INVITED ESSAY
AFTER FUKUSHIMA: REFLECTIONS ON RISK
AND INSTITUTIONAL LEARNING IN AN ERA OF
MEGA-CRISES
PAUL ’t HART
Triggered by the recent inquiries into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, this article reflects on the
challenges of developing and operating risk regulation and crisis management regimes in an era
of highly complex and tightly interconnected socio-technical systems. These challenges are not
just technical and professional but fundamentally institutional and cultural. The article identifies
three key paradoxes and challenges of contemporary risk and crisis management, signals a range
of recurrent problems in governments’ efforts to cope with these challenges, problematizes current
patterns of societal learning from crises, and sketches an agenda for public administration research
in this area.
FUKUSHIMA: A RUDE AWAKENING
On 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake followed by a tsunami hit Japan’s northeast and
overwhelmed the authorities. This natural disaster escalated into a compound crisis when
the Fukushima nuclear power plant flooded, triggering a series of power and equipment
failures, explosions, nuclear meltdowns, and eventually a release of radioactive materials.
The crisis exposed the limits of nuclear power regulation and crisis preparedness in one
of the most technologically advanced countries on earth. It is an example of a disaster that
turns into a calamity of much bigger temporal, spatial, and political proportions.
The subsequent inquiries uncovered a range of institutional vulnerabilities: all too cosy
regulator–industry relations in the so-called ‘nuclear village’; a less than vigorous safety
culture within Tepco, the mammoth power company operating the plant; a tacit but
widely shared cultural illusion of Japanese superiority in all technological and therefore
also nuclear matters; a collective ‘willing away’ of the reality that the national energy
strategy had become hostage to a technology that is fundamentally high-risk and never
fully tameable; and local communities being economically dependent on the very high-risk
facilities in whose shadows they live (National Diet of Japan 2012).
Appropriate rules and structures seemed to be in place, and responsibilities for prepared-
ness and response were formally allocated across a wide range of government authorities.
But the plans which called them into existence proved to be ‘fantasy documents’ (Clarke
2001): paper-driven exercises in wishful thinking that bore no correspondence to the
much more fickle and vulnerable on-the-ground realities of risk management and crisis
preparedness. Cutting through all the ritual word games, the essence of the planning
appeared to be:
1. This is not the USA or Russia: nothing will ever happen.
2. If something did happen, we will contain the incident on-site.
3. Therefore we need not plan for what might happen if we cannot.
For those who placed their belief in these plans, the reality of Fukushima was a rude
awakening.
Professor Paul ’t Hart is in the School of Governance at Utrecht University, The Netherlands and in the ‘Netherlands
School of Public Administration’ (NSOB), The Hague.
Public Administration Vol. 91, No. 1, 2013 (101–113)
©2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.
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