Responsible Risk Governance in Hazardous Industries

Dear Colleagues,

Responsible risk governance reflects the idea that risks at both the assessment and management stages need to be governed responsibly with the involvement of as many key stakeholders as possible, only one of which is the industry. The importance of responsible risk governance becomes especially prominent in the domain of hazardous industries where accidental or intentional events may inflict severe societal and environmental consequences. As such, hazardous industries in the 21st century should not only bring economic growth, profit, and more efficiency, but should also be fair, sustainable, safe, secure, and socially and ethically acceptable.

An important way for accommodating societal and ethical acceptability is to include a broader range of stakeholders in risk governance decisions so that the important societal values such as justice, privacy, safety and security upheld by each stakeholder could be taken into account. This could, however, be rather challenging since such values do not always converge. Different stakeholders might uphold different values; they might even endorse the same values but interpret them differently. Besides, sometimes the values cannot be realized simultaneously (e.g., privacy and security) or there might be ethical issues that cannot be dealt with by inclusiveness. Technologies creating intergenerational risks and benefits, for instance, pose intricate ethical issues that cannot be easily dealt with by including merely the current stakeholders. Responsible risk governance in hazardous industries thus includes the difficulties associated with including a diversity of—sometimes diverging—values while addressing intricate ethical matters such as justice to people not yet born.

The present special issue is an attempt to promote the concept of responsible risk governance in hazardous facilities via ethical, empirical, or analytical methods. Examples of hazardous facilities of interest include but are not limited to chemical and process plants, nuclear power plants, oil and gas facilities as well as transportation of hazardous materials (road, rail, water, pipeline), where an irresponsible risk governance can potentially cause significant damage to the environment and/or public health.

We are seeking unpublished and novel contributions from a diverging number of fields including risk analysis, business ethics, responsible research and innovations, risk ethics, etc., which may include, but are not limited to:

• Value-driven design and decision making
• Integration of safety and security in risk assessment and management
• The acceptable levels of safety and security
• The role of institutions in responsible technology and innovation
• How to operationalize and incentivize responsible risk management in hazardous industries

Dr. Genserik Reniers
Dr. Nima Khakzad
Dr. Behnam Taebi
Guest Editors

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