IRGC’s risk governance framework has been developed to help policy makers, regulators and risk managers both understand the concept of risk governance and apply it to their handling of risks.
Besides the standard elements of risk handling – risk assessment, management and communication – the IRGC framework incorporates additional activities which reflect the need to deal with risk in a way that fully accounts for the societal context of both the risk and the decision that is reached.
- IRGC risk governance framework
There are 5 elements to the framework :
risk pre-assessment, early warning and "framing" the risk in order to provide a structured definition of the problem, of how it is framed by different stakeholders, and of how it may best be handled
risk appraisal, combining a scientific risk assessment (of the hazard and its probability) with a systematic concern assessment (of public concerns and perceptions) to provide the knowledge base for subsequent decisions
characterisation and evaluation, in which the scientific data and a thorough understanding of societal values affected by the risk are used to evaluate the risk as acceptable, tolerable (requiring mitigation), or intolerable (unacceptable)
risk management, the actions and remedies needed to avoid, reduce transfer or retain the risk
risk communication : how stakeholders and civil society understand the risk and participate in the risk governance process
The framework offers an interdisciplinary and multi-level governance approach. Importantly, it urges risk governance institutions to gather and base their decisions not only on knowledge about the physical impacts of technologies, natural events or human activities but also knowledge about the concerns that people associate with these and other causes of risks.
| A detailed description of the framework was published in IRGC’s White Paper “Risk Governance – Towards an Integrative Framework” in 2005. |
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