Tomorrow’s disaster: Prevention vs. Reaction in Democratic Societies

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Abstract

ecurity and protection are core values of democratic societies. Citizens expect of their governments to take care for their security. But due to their specific temporality, democratic decision making is confronted with challenges: The state ought to prevent future harm and is exactly then successful with it, when nothing happens. How should, therefore, current politics look like in the face of the uncertainty of knowledge about future events and developments in our complex modern societies?Risk governance is one possible answer to this question as it allows to put into perspective the temporality of future disasters by localizing the areas with the most important needs and by identifying actors to act on these. But it is by far not the only answer. This contribution differentiates between four possible approaches to future security problems and their consequences for political action. The approaches differ in how they cope with uncertainty and non-knowledge as well as in where they place responsibility for political action: with the state, private and civil society actors and/or citizens. The contribution systematizes these different approaches in a typology that is constructed of four ideal type concepts: Emergency preparedness, risk governance, resilience and the all-hazards-approach.Although in principle applicable to all kinds of security problems, the contribution illustrates these approaches by the example of natural hazards. They are extreme examples as the risks they pose could realize tomorrow or never at all. By applying the typology, different courses of political action regarding future natural disasters can be distinguished. They range from the preparation for future emergencies to risk reduction, adaption or even pre-emption. As democratic societies, they allow us to choose if we prefer to react today to future hazards as implied by politics of emergency preparedness or the all-hazards-approach or if we prefer to prevent the hazards to materialize and/or cause harm as intended by risk governance and resilience approaches.

Speakers from the University of Münster

Prokopf, Christine

Professorship of Sustainable Development (Prof. Fuchs)