Perspectives on risk in a decision-making context – Review and discussion

There exist many perspectives on risk, and traditionally some of the perspectives have been seen as representing completely different frameworks, making the exchange of ideas and results difficult. Much of the existing discussions on risk perspectives have in our view lacked a sufficient level of precision on the fundamental ideas of risk assessments and management. For example, there is more than one line of thinking in risk analysis and assessment and mixing all approaches into one gives a rather meaningless discussion. In this presentation we summarise and categorise some of the common perspectives on risk, including an approach integrating aspects of technical and economic risk analyses, as well as social scientists’ perspectives on risk. For the different perspectives we clarify the meaning of key concepts such as risk and uncertainty. Special focus is placed on the different perspectives’ impact on decision-making. Implementation of the ALARP principle is used as an example to illustrate the differences.