Forecasting, warning, and responding to transnational risks

Assembling a high profile group of scholars and practitioners, this book investigates the interplay of forecasting; warnings about, and responses to, known and unknown transnational risks. It challenges conventional accounts of 'failures' of warning and preventive policy in both the academic literature and public debate. What does it take to recognise and prevent hazards with international causes and consequences? How can we handle the risks related to financial instability, terrorism, pandemics, air pollution, flooding and climate change? The book brings together scholars and senior practitioners from different areas to conceptualise and empirically study the interlinked problems of forecasting, warning and mobilising preventive action. Contributors comment on key problems such as uncertainty, silo-mentality, spotting weak-signals, cultures of blame, conflicts of interest and divergent risk perceptions, but are also sensitive to differences between actors and types of risk. The overall thrust is to challenge both technocratic and popularised accounts of the warning-response problem. Successful prevention or mitigation involves difficult cognitive, normative and political judgements. Whilst these difficulties cannot be eliminated, contributors suggest ways in which organisations, journalists, scientists and decision-makers can at least mitigate them

Introduction: the challenges of prevention / Chiara de Franco and Christoph O. Meyer -- The coastline of the future: some limits on forecasting and prediction / Sir David Omand -- Epistemology of forecasting in international relations: knowing the difference between 'intelligence failure' and 'warning failure' / Jan Goldman -- FORESEC: lessons learnt from a pan-European security foresight project / Ville Brummer [and others] -- Modelling transnational environmental risks: scenarios for decision support / Fabian Wagner -- Risk, uncertainty and the assessment of organised crime / Tom Vander Beken -- Mediatised warnings: late, wrong, yet indispensable? Lessons from climate change and civil war / Chiara de Franco and Christoph O. Meyer -- Do they listen? Communicating warnings: an intelligence practitioner's perspective / William Shapcott -- Responding to early flood warnings in the European Union / David Demeritt and Sebastien Nobert -- Dark secrets: face-work, organisational culture and disaster prevention / Marc S. Gerstein and Edgar H. Schein -- Transnational risk management: a business perspective / Corene Crossin and James Smither -- From the 'neurotic' to the 'rationalising' st…