The Dictionary of Human Geography (177 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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risk
In the first, technical, sense, risk refers to the probability of a known event (which may be a cost or a benefit) occurring. Such probabilities assume that causes and conse quences can be determined, mapped and pre dicted. This is a highly rationalist endeavour characteristic of modernity and a belief in controllability. Risk in this sense is about knowing the world, and is therefore not sub ject to uncertainty or indeterminacy. In order for such a probability to be calculated, the risk must be first identified (e.g. failure of an air craft engine, the development of lung cancer, leakage of radioactive waste). The pathways to the event also need to be identified, and the likelihood of such pathways and events occur ring needs to be calculated. The latter will often require some element of technical know ledge, but also an understanding of the social and institutional relations that surround a risk (e.g. the ability of a regulatory body to police possible risk pathways). In certain circumstan ces, probabilities can be calculated from past events (the chances of developing lung cancer from smoking can be estimated from popula tion data). In other circumstances, where events are uncommon or where new technolo gies mean that there are few if any precedents, determining risk becomes more and more con tentious. Not only are the occurrences or manifest dangers/benefits difficult to second guess, but the pathways to them may be impossible to imagine prior to the event, and the institutions responsible for regulating behaviour may not be sufficiently established or experienced. Meanwhile, given the geo graphical, material and social complexities of everything from taking a drug to building a nuclear power station, the ability to calculate risk becomes ever more fraught with uncer tainty and indeterminacy. The growing sense of the non calculability of risks feeds in to a second, more qualitative, sense of risk. Here, risk takes on a meaning that has more akin with uncontrollability and danger. Most effectively taken up in Beck?s Risk society (1992) and Mary Douglas? anthropology of risk and blame (Douglas, 1992), risk becomes a contestable issue in society at large. All calculations become liable to re calculation or to rendering non calculable. Controversies over risk become more and more common as various individuals and bodies contest each other?s estimation of events and pathways, and dispute the ability of responsible or regulatory bodies to shepherd technologies, processes and markets in such a way as to minimize risk (the ongoing battles over the (NEW PARAGRAPH) environmental and human safety or otherwise of genetically modified foods is a case in point) (Bingham and Blackmore, 2003). The latter, institutional, element to risk debates has been taken up most effectively by those researchers who have investigated the dynamics of trust relationships between (expert) respon sible bodies and (lay) publics (Wynne, 1992, 1996). At the same time, and partly on account of the inevitably of ?not knowing?, risk enters the vernacular as something that should be encour aged, for if risks are not taken then nothing cre ative or new can be generated. Nevertheless, as Douglas (1992) and Lupton (1999) have argued, risk increasingly refers to the hazards, dangers, threats and contingencies of actions. (See also biosecurity; security.) sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bingham and Blackmore (2003); Lupton (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
risk society
An account of late modern soci ety, developed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in the mid 1980s (Beck, 1992), emphasizing mid to late twentieth century shifts in (a) people?s awareness and experience of uncertainties and dependencies, and (b) the manner in which late modern societies produce risks (see also Modernity). Beck?s Risk society was in no way meant to suggest that life had become more dangerous; rather, it was the manner in which probabilities and uncertainties were generated and were han dled that had changed. Life had become more contestable, and contested there were more choices to be made, more matters to debate. Macnaghten and Urry (1998, p. 254) provide the following summary of these societal shifts: (NEW PARAGRAPH) Public awareness of the riskiness of hith erto mundane aspects of daily life (e.g. foodstuffs, travel, work life, reproduc tion) had intensified. (NEW PARAGRAPH) There had been a growth in the degree of uncertainty that surrounded those risks. (NEW PARAGRAPH) People?s sense of dependency upon the institutions and expertise responsible for managing and controlling risks had grown. (NEW PARAGRAPH) At the same time, the degree of public trust in those institutions and in exper tise to manage risks effectively had diminished. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These experiential and individualizing aspects of risk society, which have drawn on a criticaL theory tradition and which have much in com mon with Anthony Giddens? structuration theory, have been readily taken up in sociology (NEW PARAGRAPH) and geography (Beck, Giddens and Lash, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . However, it is the account?s relevance to late modern technologies and environment that has perhaps had most geographical pur chase (Beck, 1995). In the former, Beck?s use of the term ?reflexive modernization? suggests a society more aware of its conditions, more able to deliberate on futures and their conse quences. But this emphasis on the cognitive capabilities of human societies is undermined by another sense that Beck gives to reflexive modernization. refLexivity here refers to the ?reverberations? that actions entail (Latour, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . It is the realization that any action dis charges a series of consequences, only some of which will be known or knowable prior to the event. Instead of more mastery through greater awareness, risk society signals a world in which ?we become conscious that consciousness does not mean full control? (Latour, 2003, p. 36). In this latter sense, Beck?s use of arche typal examples of risk society technologies, including nuclear power (he was writing soon after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986) and chemical industries, emphasizes the shifts in the reach of these returns (risks involve larger swathes of space and time; they contribute to gLObALizatiON and affect future generations) and the entanglements that exist between what had hitherto been considered as separate spheres of science and politics. It is here that risk society might prefigure a more progressive politics, not so much rooted in an inevitable individualization of life choices, but generating a sense of common matters of concern. sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Beck (1992). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
rogue state
A term coined in the USA in the 1990s, referring to a country that is believed to imperil world peace through its violation of international rules and norms. The US government claims to use the follow ing objective criteria to identify a rogue state: an authoritarian regime that violates huMAN rights; sponsorship of terrorism; and devel opment of and trade in weapons of mass destruction. Critics claim that ?rogue state? is merely a rhetorical tool used to justify diplo matic and military action against a state that challenges the geopolitical goals of the USA (Hoyt, 2000), while others suggest that all three criteria rebound on the recent past and present of the USA itself. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Chomsky (2000); Klare (1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
rural geography
The superstructure of modern academic geograPHY was thoroughly metropolitan London, Paris, Berlin, Chicago but its foundations were in the countryside. Paul Vidal de la Blache devel oped his regionaL geograPHY through close (though not exclusive) attention to the peasant cultures of rural France, for example, while Carl Ortwin Sauer?s vision of cuLturaL geo graPHY focused on the evolution of rural and agrarian LanDscapes in the Americas. Even early Location tHeorY and spatiaL science looked to the countryside for their origins: von tHÂÂ81nen?s model of agricultural land use was based on records from his country estate, Christaller?s centraL PLace tHeorY was rooted in a stable world of southern Bavarian marketplaces rather than explosive urban industrial growth, and Torsten Hagerstrand?s DiFFusion theory grew out of his studies of the Swedish countryside. But the distinction between citY and countryside is a culturally constructed one (Williams, 1973), and there is an important tradition of HistoricaL geo graPHY in Europe and North America that has long been concerned with reconstructing its historical transformations (e.g. the work of the Permanent European Conference for the Study of the Rural Landscape, established in 1957: see http://www.pecsrl.org). (NEW PARAGRAPH) No less importantly, the distinction also var ies over space. In Europe, and particularly in Britain, rural geography has recently been revivified as a response to a series of political and cultural concerns: the ?threat to the coun tryside? and to wildlife posed by urBanization, the transformation of agriculture and the aggressive rise of agribusiness (see also agri cuLturaL geograPHY), the rise of new modes of recreation and the development of ?second homes? in the countryside, the changing cLass composition of rural communities, and the ways in which all these issues are entangled in wider debates about the politics and ProDuc tion of nature. These politico intellectual responses have challenged the concept of rurality (Marsden, Murdoch, Lowe, Munton and Flynn, 1993; Cloke, 2006) and increas ingly treated the rural as a series of cultural constructs rather than a set of geographically bounded spaces (Murdoch, 2003). In North America there have been comparable, historic ally sensitive studies of the exploitations and oppressions embedded in the production of agrarian landscapes (Mitchell, 1996) and of the imaginative geograPHies through which they have been domesticated, notably in Literature and film (Henderson, 1999), though probably few of those responsible would situate their work within a distinctively rural geography. Similarly, some of the most exciting work in poLiticaL ecoLogy and envir onmental studies in America Kosek?s (2006) analysis of New Mexico?s forests, Sayre?s (2002) accounts of ranching in the Southwest, Hollander?s history of the Everglades (2008) has taken as its theatre of operations the rural broadly construed. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Still more generally, the classic agrarian Question has directed attention to the differ entiation of rural producers, the contribution of the rural sector to capitalist accumulation, and the politics of class distinctions in the countrysides of the global south. Here, the vast literature on peasants has rarely attempted to theorize rurality but has instead preferred to focus on social differentiation, the organization of work and household dynamics (Bassett, 2001; Gidwani, 2008). Analysis of the so called urban bias (Lipton, 1977) and of rural urban linkages has been especially fruitful in generating new questions about the formation of complex, hybrid urban rural spaces (McGee, 1991) and about power, patronage politics and differential forms of accumulation across space (Hart, 2002; Chari, 2004). The World Bank?s World Development Report for 2008 notes that ?three out of every four poor people in developing countries live in rural areas 2.1 billion living on less than $2 a day, and 880 million on less than $1 a day and most depend on agricul ture for their livelihoods?. It also notes that rural poverty has declined over the past twenty years in East Asia and the Pacific, largely the result of improving conditions in the countryside rather than out migration, but that the number of rural poor has con tinued to rise in South Asia and sub Saharan Africa. A distinguishing characteristic of rural poverty is its disproportionate toll on women and the exposure of the rural workforce to the fragmentation of labour markets, and the impermanence and seasonality of labour con tracts. Indeed, one of the central findings of the Report is the extent to which agricultural populations are dependent upon off farm income, in which the structure of the rural, non agricultural economy is crucial. The questions that dominate rural geographies in these regions include drought, famine and global climate change (Watts, 1983a; see gLobaL warming); the production of food and access to water; dispossession and the politics of deveLopment; the violence of resource wars and other forms of (NEW PARAGRAPH) late modern war; and the state regulation of migrancy and mobiLity. These issues are urgent reminders that the production and transformation of the rural is by no means confined to the global North and is every where enmeshed with gLobaLization (cf. Woods, 2007; McCarthy, 2008). Despite the predictions of the imminent demise of the peasantry in the global South and the depopu lation of the countryside in the North, the rural continues to be a site of political contest ation, from debates over the agricultural policy of the European Union to the resurgence of rural protest in China. dg/jL/mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cloke, Marsden and Mooney (2006); Murdoch and Marsden (1994). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
rural planning
The attempt to organize and control the distribution of deveLopment and resources across rural areas: concerns include the management of land use change (see Land use and Land cover change) in relation to the built and some aspects of the natural environ ment, as well as economic and social issues. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rural planning in the developed world has two main functions: first, the strategic alloca tion of development through the production of frameworks and principles for resource distribution and conservation; and, second, the control of the alteration, growth and design of the built form (cf. zoning). Tensions have frequently arisen in planning for rural areas between the many demands on rural land, particularly in the context of the changing importance of farming and food production. In addition, pressure from counter urbanization in many parts of the developed world has introduced conflicts within rural planning between the desire to conserve the natural environment and provide housing in desirable residential areas. In some rural areas, land use designations such as nationaL parks have sought to maintain tight control on development and resource use in the most valued environments. In developing countries, emphasis is placed less on control but, rather, on the generation of economic growth in the distribution of resources and the organization of agricultural development. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The study of rural planning during the 1970s and early 1980s was largely descriptive and uncritical. From the late 1980s, however, greater attention was paid to the power rela tions within which planning operated, includ ing the influence of social cLass over the allocation of resources and the broader stra tegic direction of the planning process (Cloke and Little, 1990). Particular attention was given to the role of environmental politics in shaping planning agendas and outcomes (Williams, 2001). More recently, these discus sions have been set within understandings of the shifting nature of governance within rural communities and of the relevance of new decision making structures and responsibil ities (Goodwin, 1998). Work on the emer gence of new forms of rural politics has also helped to inform contemporary research on rural planning (see Woods, 2006). jL (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lapping (2006); Woods and Goodwin (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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