Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Extreme weather events will have greater impacts on those social, economic and
industrial sectors which have close links to climate - for example, water, agriculture
and food security, forestry, health and tourism. In many regions, the degree and
nature of resultant economic losses as a result of climate extremes will be themselves
influenced by political and socioeconomic factors.
The social construction of risk
For some sociologists, risk is never fully objective or knowable outside of our pre-
existing knowledge and moral beliefs. All knowledge about risk is bound to the
socio-cultural contexts from which it emerged. We can only know or perceive risk
from a particular socio-cultural milieu or worldview. As Lupton neatly summarizes:
Scientific knowledge, or any other knowledge, is never value-free, but rather is
always the product of a way of seeing. A risk, therefore, is not a static objective
phenomenon, but is constantly constructed and negotiated as part of the network
of social interaction and the formation of meaning. 'Expert' judgements of risk,
rather than being the 'objective' or 'neutral', and therefore 'unbiased', assessments
they tend to be portrayed as in the techno-scientific literature, are regarded as
being equally as constructed through implicit social and cultural processes as
are lay people's judgements.
(1999: 28)
The 'weak' social constructionist will see risks as cultural mediations of real
hazards, whereas the 'strong' social constructionist will sees hazards and risks as
existing only when people recognize and label them as such. In this way, debates in
the public sphere, political activism, local campaigning, social refusal and anti-
corporate feeling lead to a more reflexive, questioning society, where the constitution
and generation of understanding is an ongoing process, where knowledge becomes
knowledges, and where uncertainty becomes a given in contemporary life. We need
to critically reflect on both our understandings and on our actions. We need to reflect
on how we change the world and how the world changes us.
In our modern globalized risk society, this reflexivity, which for Beck means 'self-
confrontation rather than mere reflection', manifests itself in three ways:
1
Society becomes an issue and a problem for itself at a global level.
2
Awareness of the global nature of risk stimulates the growth of cooperative
international institutions and programmes.
3
State and political boundaries become less significant, as global risks require
global action, for example on climate change.
For Beck, reflexivity offers both hope and danger:
This combination of reflex and reflections, as long as the catastrophe itself fails
to materialize, can set industrial modernization on the path to self-criticism and
self-transformation. Reflexive modernization contains both elements: the reflex-
like threat to industrial society's own foundations through a successful further
modernization which is blind to dangers and the growth of awareness, the
reflection on this situation.
(1996: 34)
