Conclusion: New Perspectives for Theorising and Addressing Transnational Risks

Preventing serious harm at little cost through foresighted action is a tantalising prospect. It is also a highly elusive goal, as the contributions to this book show. Obstacles stretch all the way across the four challenges we identified in the introductory chapter and which form the analytical backbone of this book: forecasting, warning, learning and mobilising preventive action. The odds seem to be stacked against overcoming the warning-response gap, particularly when risks are transnational and require coordinated responses. Forensic inquiries into industrial accidents or plane crashes typically reveal multiple failures forming an idiosyncratic causal chain leading to disaster. The opposite appears to be true for warnings at a time when they would be most useful. Genuinely surprising warnings are transmitted through a long, fragile chain, where each link has to withstand extreme pressure and individuals need to make difficult balancing judgements under conditions of uncertainty. The chapters by Tom Huertas and Gillian Tett illustrate why this was the case with the near meltdown of the world financial system in 2008. However, there are important variations across different constellations of risks and actors in how the warning-response process unfolds, as illustrated by cases of more propitious conditions for preventive policies like air pollution (Chapter 5) and flooding (Chapter 9).