The concept of risk in Norwegian risk-prevention politics : an analysis of the report from the "Vulnerability Commission"

Abstract

Summary This is a thesis about technology and to a lesser extent, science. To be more precise, it is about how a technological society (Norway) tries to protect itself from risk born from the same technology that is sustaining it. The thesis is more specifically about how a governmental appointed commission made a risk assessment on behalf of the Norwegian society in the year 2000. The commission was commonly referred to as the “Vulnerability Commission”, since one of it’s main findings was that modern society is becoming increasingly more vulnerable. This thesis analyses the commissions use of the “technical” risk concept, where risk is defined as a function of the probability of possible unwanted events and the consequences of these. The central theme in this thesis is that “how” risk is defined, is something that greatly influences how a risk assessment is, and can be done. By choosing to define risk in this manner, the commission have a priori reduced or excluded some aspects of risk from the assessment. The main part of this thesis is therefore about how the choice of a specific risk definition to some extent “directed” the answers the commission gave in response to it’s mandate.