Corporate and Public Responses to Uncertainty: Understanding the Challenge of Collaboration

Our present-day environment, climatic and otherwise, is characterized by the advent of major emergent risk events – events that have proven to have large and indiscriminate effects across societies and the various organizational forms that exist within. Catastrophes have always plagued humankind, but today they are enhanced by global interconnectivities that serve to either heighten our awareness and the immediacy of such exposures or accelerate/extend the actual catastrophic effects themselves. The criticality of this new environment is not just a matter of perception; data clearly support the view that we are facing a new environmental context. Within the field of risk management, these socalled social risks (in their broadest form, referred to as global risks) underscore at least two key challenges. First, addressing the breadth and scope of these risks inevitably requires cooperative and collaborative responses; few single organizations or entities have the capacity to “go it alone.” And second, recent experiences (especially the pandemic and climate change) have demonstrated the specific need to collaborate across sectors, public, private and all variants between. To be sure, much has been written about cross-sector collaboration in particular contexts, such as public/private partnerships, outsourcing and corporate social responsibility, but the same cannot be said about the particularities of collaborative effort in risk management. Hence, this chapter considers the challenge of understanding collaboration in cross-sector contexts. In the course of this exploration, a version of risk management emerges, built upon a rather distinct set of properties: (1) there are not necessarily clear, pre-existing lines of authority or responsibility; (2) individual organizations (and other bodies) have insufficient scope and/or capacity to fully assess and address the risks in question; and (3) any effective risk management seems to call for widespread adaptive collaboration and cooperation. These properties will prove to place particular importance on the question of leadership.