Focus and Work Programme
Most of the problem fields prioritised by IRGC are characterised by the scale of their potential impact, their long-term nature and by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. They all present substantial challenges to those responsible for developing and implementing appropriate policy initiatives, not least because of their global nature and the complicated network of international, governmental and other organisations – including business – responsible for their management.
In particular, IRGC concentrates its attention on ignored or neglected risk issues – issues for which no single organisation, government or company perceives itself as having responsibility and where there is a general lack of interest because the consequences of the risk seem uncertain, remote or without ramifications for stakeholders’ immediate material interests. IRGC tasks itself with bringing these emerging risk issues, along with their potential benefits and potential adverse consequences, to the attention of policymakers and risk practitioners. Examples of past projects include, but are not limited to:
- Risk Governance
- Synthetic Biology
- Geoengineering
- Pollination Services
- Carbon Capture & Storage
- Nanotechologies
- Bioenergy
- Critical Infrastructures
- Influenza Pandemic
Read more about this topic: International Risk Governance Council
Famous quotes containing the words focus and, focus, work and/or programme:
“Why is it so difficult—so degradingly difficult—to bring the notion of Time into mental focus and keep it there for inspection? What an effort, what fumbling, what irritating fatigue!”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I don’t have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That’s all I want to do, and that’s all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“The idealist’s programme of political or economic reform may be impracticable, absurd, demonstrably ridiculous; but it can never be successfully opposed merely by pointing out that this is the case. A negative opposition cannot be wholly effectual: there must be a competing idealism; something must be offered that is not only less objectionable but more desirable.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)