Risk Assessment, Policy-Making and the Limits of Knowledge: The Precautionary Principle and International Relations
| Author | Alan Patterson,John Williams,Craig McLean |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117809348704 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
548 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 23(4)
Risk Assessment, Policy-Making and the Limits of
Knowledge: The Precautionary Principle and
International Relations
Craig McLean, Alan Patterson and John Williams
Abstract
This paper looks at the way in which the idea of the Precautionary Principle, increasingly
influential in environmental and other policy areas, is being and might be used in foreign
and security policy. It aims to contrast the relative precision with which the term is used
in the environmental arena with the current usage in international relations. Contrasting
the Precautionary Principle with ideas of precaution, prevention, pre-emption and similar
terms in post-structuralist analyses of risk, humanitarian intervention and US foreign
policy in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the paper identifies costs and benefits in
deploying a more carefully specified account of the Precautionary Principle. In particular,
it highlights key issues of regulatory authority and the way in which policy-makers and
analysts understand and respond to the limits of knowledge and knowledge systems as
important challenges to which careful use of the Precautionary Principle can potentially
contribute. The paper concludes by suggesting that both policy-making and policy analysis
could potentially be improved by adapting and extending the idea of the Precautionary
Principle as it is deployed in other policy arenas.
Keywords: governmentality, hazard, Iraq War, Just War, precaution, Precautionary
Principle, risk, security
Introduction
The language of foreign policy has been significantly altered since the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Led by the Bush
administration’s much analysed, debated and critiqued National Security Strategies
of 2002 and 2006, the issues of regime change and preventive war (or pre-emptive
war in the terms of the National Security Strategy) have driven the idea that attaining
national security in the face of terrorism requires innovative techniques.1 The use
of enhanced interrogation techniques (or torture in plain terms) and ‘extraordinary
rendition’ have reinforced the argument that a changed security situation and different
sort of security threat demand a move away from previously proscribed practices.2
What holds together these different instances of those arguments for innovation
is the idea of anticipatory action, sometimes labelled ‘precaution’.3 In order for the
US government (although the argument ought, in theory anyway, to hold for any
other government) to fulfil its fundamental ‘obligation’ to provide for the security
© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:
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[DOI: 10.1177/0047117809348704]
THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 549
of its citizens in changed circumstances, action must be taken in advance of threats
becoming fully formed and indisputably apparent.4 Whether that be overthrowing
governments suspected of planning to acquire nuclear weapons, or striking terrorist
organisations planning further mass-casualty attacks or, at its most threatening,
a proliferating government willing and able to assist a terrorist organisation, the
gathering of intelligence information and the snuffing out of plots must take place
at the earliest possible opportunity.5
The idea of anticipatory action in advance of complete knowledge of either the
consequences or likelihood of a particular course of action has generated a great
deal of political and academic debate and discussion, and in realms well beyond the
foreign policy of the United States. Ideas of hazard, risk and precaution are indeed
embedded in the legal, institutional and regulatory practices of policy-making in areas
such as environmental and public health policy, in particular via the ‘Precautionary
Principle’ (PP). In these arenas, these terms have acquired, over three decades or so
of debate, advocacy and implementation, a comparative precision of meaning and
rigour of use that is in contrast to the way such terms are generally deployed across
accounts of foreign policy-making and analysis.
Specifically, this paper aims to look at the way that current discussion of risk and
the Precautionary Principle confuse a number of separable ideas and draw their power
from different intellectual backgrounds and approaches. There is, for example, a lack
of careful differentiation between hazard and risk that tends to blur the physical,
measurable and predictable with the social, subjective and unpredictable. Concepts
of ‘risk’ and ‘precaution’ are deployed in various ways: for example, analyses of
governmentality indebted to Foucault;6 notions of precaution, very different in kind
from the post-structuralist readings, derived from Just War theory;7 and a general sense
of ‘better safe than sorry’ underpinning preventive war strategies.8 None of these, the
paper argues, captures the idea of the Precautionary Principle as used in other policy
arenas, and this is unfortunate for two reasons. First, it confuses and undermines a
useful tool for policy-making and policy analysis. Second, it serves to obscure a key
challenge facing efforts to transpose precautionary policy-making from arenas like
environmental policy to foreign policy: regulatory authority.
Risk, hazard and the Precautionary Principle
Within arenas where the Precautionary Principle affects policy-making and analysis
there are typically two elements to assessing a potential threat. First is hazard, which
can be defined as ‘threats to people and the things they value’.9 Second is the concept
of risk which is commonly defined as ‘the probability of an adverse future event
multiplied by its magnitude’.10 These are clearly linked – hazard is a necessary element
of risk – but they tend to invite different types of analytical approach depending on
the types of hazard that we are concerned with and the way in which we understand
probability and magnitude. The debate on hazards and risks tends to fall under two
distinct arguments: objective risk (science-based assessments of risk issues); and
perceived risk (risk as a cultural construct). Objective risk is a way of accurately
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