The aim of this study is to develop a framework for systematically assessing risk to governance processes, particular risk with consequences for human safety. This is based on 1) attempting to integrate several governance literatures that are relevant, on corporate, supply chain and risk governance; 2) analysing failures of governance processes in the nuclear industry that have created significant risk to human safety; and 3) eliciting the understandings of governance and experiences of governance failure among both staff in the nuclear industry and inspectors working for a nuclear safety regulator.
The corporate-, supply chain- and risk-governance literatures are very different in their specific concerns and theoretical orientations. Corporate governance typically has drawn on agency theory (and latterly alternatives such as stewardship theory). Supply chain governance has drawn most strongly on transaction cost economics. Risk governance has drawn on ideas from political science and more specifically from various areas of risk studies, such as risk communication. But the different literatures generally have two central elements in common: the reflexive oversight of organized activity, and the coordination of multiple interests. It is therefore failure in such processes that we concentrate on.
The analysis of governance failure has been based on looking for explanations that involve adaptation processes. A number of recent studies in the risk literature have been concerned with adaptive governance (Klinke and Renn, 2012; Hurlbert and Gupta, 2016), which mostly assume that adaptation is a favourable capacity. But we argue that adaptation produces risk as well as resilience. In the first part of our study we therefore analyse a number of nuclear incidents to determine how adaptation has produced governance failures. This involves both the use of investigative reports in the public domain and interviews with industry and regulatory staff. The result is a taxonomy of maladapations. These ramge from adaptations to external social pressures through to adaptations to one’s own prior decisions.
We then develop a framework for governance risk assessment. This is based on the basic principle of searching for potential maladaptation, and draws both on the empirical work on governance failures and on the concept of affordances.