The Market for Anarchy: Systems of risk control in transnational governance

Governments and international organizations are increasingly relying on specialised advice from firms and other professional actors on how to assess and manage risks, such as climate, health, cyber, and finance. We analyse who is giving advice on risk assessment and its management, and whether there is any systematic patterns in what type of risk is being foregrounded. The hypothesis of the project is that there is an emerging "market" for the assessment and management of risks, which changes how states and international organizations relate governs. In some cases, these risk assessments are done by scientific experts, but increasingly this is something done by consulting firms, who specialise in assessing and suggesting tools for how to manage risks for national and international authorities.

Vårt utgangspunkt var å bedre forstå og forklare et fenomen som bare har blitt mer og mer fremtredende i global styring: private selskaper - og da særlig konsulentselskaper - har i økende grad beveget seg inn på et felt som tidligere var dominert av internasjonale organisasjoner og frivillige organisasjoner. Det brukes også stadig flere konsulenter internt i internasjonale organisasjoner, som delvis erstatter rollen som embedsverket tidligere har hatt. Over tid har også internasjonale organisasjoner blitt mer og mer like private aktører i hvordan de rekrutterer ansatte, hvordan de orienterer seg mot omverden, og hvordan ekspertise forstås. I sum har prosjektet både identifisert og kartlagt en omfattende trend mot at markedslogikk blir styrende for internasjonale organisasjoner, at konsulentselskaper blir stadig viktigere aktører, og at hvordan ekspertise forstås er i endring. I tillegg til disse empiriske funnene har prosjektet bidratt til å flytte den internasjonale forskningsfronten gjennom begrepsmessig innovasjon og teoretiske bidrag, blant annet om konsulenter, ekspertise, og forholdet mellom organisasjoner og institusjoner.

The Market for Anarchy project seeks to contribute to a systemic problem shift in how we understand the governance of risk by bringing into analytical focus transnational professional networks. Established theories privilege a focus on state behaviour and tend to treat risk governance as a matter of security, either military or societal. As a result, the governance of risks is interpreted within established frameworks of international security. This approach overlooks how - and who - produces the risk assessments that inform state behaviour. Through carefully selected empirical case studies of the management of pandemics, climate change, cybersecurity, money laundering and conflict management, the project team will generate new knowledge about a comparatively understudied set of actors (professional networks in risk governance), identify who controls knowledge about risks and to what purpose, and systematically investigate how states respond to risk and to the networks and the specific risk understandings they promote. The project has an ambitious conceptual framework and innovative set of methods. Early phases of the project will be devoted to refining and test-driving the approach, before a consistent data collection strategy is implemented across the case study areas. The input of the Advisory Board (see the project description) will be useful in this regard. The project team has been carefully assembled to bring together both theoretical and methodological capacity and empirical knowledge of the specific case study fields addressed.