By Sophie Flemig (University of Edinburgh)
Risk is a social construct, in other words, it is formed by the way that we talk about it and evaluate it in our communities. Therefore, the discussion must include everyone: law-makers, public service professionals, service users, and the communities in which they are based. We call this “risk governance” rather than “risk management”.
Such risk governance frameworks can be flexible. Sometimes, social innovations are relatively straightforward and simple. Think of the extension of a bus service for the elderly to include new stops. In this case, technical risk management may well be sufficient – the variables are more or less known and the service has already been tried and tested. Other social innovations are more complex and require an equally sophisticated risk governance approach that involves a wide number of stakeholders. For example, we worked with a conservation charity whose projects involved species preservation but also issues of ecological balance and the interests of the local community. Their approach to risk took into account these multiple layers and competing interests, so they widened the discussion to all those who were potentially affected by their conservation plans.
We also found that such complex risk governance frameworks are often quite expensive – they require dedicated staff for communication, community engagement, and media relations, on top of the managerial staff already involved in more traditional risk management. Often, it is small to medium-size organisations that are at the forefront of social innovation, yet they are also the most ill-equipped in terms of dedicating resources to risk governance.
These findings let us to conclude that regulatory frameworks and professional governance bodies need to reinforce social innovation efforts by including a more sophisticated expectation how risk should be managed. This also includes non-governmental funders of social innovation projects, who can be very risk averse because they see their reputation at stake.
Moreover, policy makers should support specifically small public service organisations, for example by facilitating collaborative social innovation projects that involve several organisations. For this purpose, policy makers need to facilitate a common approach to risk and assure that no individual public service organisation can end as a scapegoat in a “blame game” scenario.
One way of doing just this would be for national bodies at an organisational level to make decisions on risk governance. Just like the medical research councils assess the risks of medical research centrally rather than leaving procedures to individual drug companies or healthcare organisations, we might see specific risk governance bodies in environmental protection, mental health and other public service fields.
Going back to the comparison to that Hollywood movie I referred to in my last post, “Along Came Polly”, after over a year of hard research work, we are now the first research project to provide empirical data that backs up Ben Stiller’s decisions in Along Came Polly: If you want a fulfilled life (and innovation-driven public services), you need Polly (and accept risk as a necessary part of life and invite it in). If you will, our LIPSE Work Package 4 is the Jennifer Aniston of research findings – clearly, it is worth a closer read.
Not an Oxymoron: A blog on Social and Public Sector Innovation 