The Logical Turn Of Risk Governance:the Activist Approach

In order to cope with the frequent emergencies in social life,emergency management activities came into being.Since the reform and opening up policy started 40 years ago,Chinese society has begun to show high-risk characteristics while rapidly developing towards modernization,which also raised the requirement of emergency management.Under the background of the emergence of risk society and the transformation of social governance,traditional passive emergency response is gradually turning into active risk management.This thesis mainly uses methods from literature analysis and comparative analysis to find out the source and characteristics of social risk in China by means of risk society theory,governance theory and complexity theory,and teasing out the internal logic and necessity of evolution from emergency management to risk governance.It is also to demonstrate that the system-based management control has been hard to sustain in nowaday’s highly complex,highly uncertain society that risk governance needs to be realized through cooperative actions,and also giving proposals about the principles of risk governance based on the theory of activism.This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter firstly identifies and analyzes the three groups of confusing concepts: emergency and emergency management,crisis and crisis management,risk and risk management,and lays the foundation for the whole research.With the development of China’s emergency management,attentions that attached to risk has been profoundly increased,especially in the context of holistic approach to national security and modernized governance,and showing a transforming trend from emergency management to risk governance.The second chapter analyzes from five aspects which resulted from resulted from the reform and open policy: broadening opening up opening up,transformation of economic system,social structure transformation,development of industry and improvement in information technology development,in order to find out the risky consequences brought by globalization,marketization,urbanization,industrialization and informationization to the Chinese society,and also summarize the risk characteristics of integrity,structuration and constructiveness in modern society,in which the manufactured risk plays a dominant role.The third chapter proposes that complexity and uncertainty are the cognitive basis of risk governance,and analyzes how the emergency management social governance model fails in the highly complex and highly uncertain social reality,pointing out that neither of risk control under bureaucracy logic nor risk transfer under market logic will be established,and a new model for risk management needs to be built up.The fourth chapter introduces the two choices of institutionalism and activism in social governance based on the distinction between institution and action priority.It points out that since being formed long ago in human society,especially after the era of industry society began the control-oriented social governance model by means of institutions,is already failing in the post-industrial society.The social risk governance needs to be realized through the action-driven cooperation.In the end,based on the theoretical viewpoint of activism,this thesis proposes 5 principles that the consciousness comes before rules in the risk governance,pluralism is better than monism,network is prior to bureaucrat,and attraction is better than thrust,service comes before control.