Too Big To Handle? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Question of Why Societies Ignore Looming Disasters

摘要

There has to be a detailed and in-depth analysis of why we don't solve looming disasters. Societies face huge and potentially disastrous problems but they are often at a loss as to how to deal with them. Academics and international organizations issued warnings concerning systemic risks in the financial system in 2007 but no action was taken. The dangers of climate change are well known, but states fail to take collective action against it. Antibiotic resistance threatens world health but constructive directives to solve the problem are few. Overfishing destroys livelihoods and endangers ecosystems. Natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and asteroids, are often too big to handle physically, but they are no longer 'Acts of God' and beyond human understanding and the possibility of prevention and disaster relief preparation. In many of these areas there is much talk, less action and only paltry gains. Even problems that are amenable to a rational solution become 'too big to handle' when placed in a societal context. This special issue of Global Policy explores the question of when and why societies are unable to handle looming disasters. It stems from a conference held on 9th and 10th October 2014, at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, also popularly and internationally known as the WIKO), well known for its encouragement of cross-disciplinary interactions.1 We followed this approach by focusing on disasters from a number of disciplinary angles. The spirit of this conference, as we envisaged it, was to 'step back', not have pre-conceived ideas, but to look at our failure to solve looming disasters from as many perspectives as possible, and to see if shared principles emerge that we should all understand in order to help address the problems. We deliberately did not try and pre-define disasters but left it up to the individual contributors as we wanted to keep all approaches open. For example, economists might seek to understand the underlying game theoretical structure or explain inaction through political economy approaches of municipal political processes and lobby groups; political scientists might argue that government structures and institutions are inadequate; sociologists may invoke group acceptance and social norms; psychologists might base an explanation on cognitive failures and the status quo bias; and philosophers and historians may ask about the sources of moral responsibility. It could even be that further scientific studies and understanding of a problem are actually needed (and that a call for those studies is not a ploy for deferring action). The goal of the conference was to ask how different academic disciplines can contribute to explaining why seemingly sensible approaches to obvious problems so often fail to be invoked. Explaining the goals of the meeting was sometimes a bit excruciating because, superficially at least, the title evoked the reaction that we had plans to somehow solve all the huge problems of humanity and exposed us to accusations of arrogance. So we developed a standard answer: 'We are not trying to solve the world's problems, but to study why and under what conditions they are not solved.' A study of why some problems have been successfully solved is no less interesting than studies of our failures. There are many real-life experiments where it becomes possible to ask why solutions have worked in some circumstances and not others. One thinks of examples such as the successful ban on lead in gasoline, the limits on dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) use, and our success in banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to prevent depletion of the ozone layer. Have specific problems been solved because they are rather 'one-dimensional'? If so, in what sense and what structures and circumstances favoured this? Do problems with huge distributional consequences have solutions and if so which? Do the answers lie in political structures and processes, game theory,