Aims & Scope
Scholarship on risk, hazards, and crises (e.g. emergencies or disasters) has developed into mature and distinct fields of inquiry; however, research in these domains frequently pays less attention to the governance implications of the important questions raised for the respective fields. The relationships between risks and hazards raise fundamental questions with broad social science and policy implications; during unstable situations of acute or chronic danger and substantial uncertainty (i.e. a crisis), important and deeply rooted societal institutions, norms, and values come into play. The purpose of this journal is to provide a forum for research and commentary that examines societies’ understanding of and measures to address risks and hazards, how public policies do and should address these concerns, and how a better understanding of societal hazard and risk situations may attenuate crises.
The journal is explicitly designed to encourage a broad perspective by integrating work from disciplines that often do not communicate with each other. The journal will look at social science theory and policy design across the spectrum of risks and crises — natural and technological hazards, public health, terrorism, and societal and environmental disasters — and across issues of risk perception, definition, prediction, management, feedback, and learning. Papers will analyze the ways that societies deal with both unpredictable and predictable events as public policy questions, which include topics such as governance, loss and liability, administrative practices, agenda setting, and the social and cultural contexts in which hazards, risks and crises are perceived and defined. To ensure effective dialogue, the journal will invite practitioners and policy makers to contribute their perspectives.
Suitable paper topics would include, but not be limited to, the following:
- Research defining and characterizing what counts as a “societal crises.” When does a condition become a crisis? Is the threshold for social crises defined differently in different issue areas (e.g., environmental, economic and health)?
- How does the structure of the public policy process enhance or impede successful societal anticipation of, and response to, crises? Such inquiry is called for at the international, national, and sub-national levels.
- How do policy designs and administrative practices for forecasting and prediction of crises interact with individual and collective incentives? Are designs prone to type-1 and type-2 prediction error? Are designs conducive to policy learning?
- How do variations in institutional and organizational designs facilitate and impede successful societal response to crises?
- How are effects of crises transferred through and between systems and networks, and how can organizational and policy design enhance the resilience of networks, institutions and processes in the presence of crises?
- In what way does the perception of the risks posed by potential crises condition anticipation and response to crises? Perceptions of risks by mass publics as well as by policy-making, scientific and practitioner communities would be fair game.
- Systematic evaluations and comparisons of current and alternative policies implicated in crises concerning environmental, health, energy, or other substantive issue areas.