Towards an analytics and an ethics of expertise: learning from decision-aiding experiences in public risk assessment and risk management

Abstract

Public expertise in safety, security and environment (SSE) is a process that is increasingly submitted to control and transparency. As decision-making, the exercise of expertise involves subjectivity and judgment. An oversight, a monitoring and an aiding approach is therefore required for its conduct and its governance. This paper proposes a novel way of embedding ethical aspects and participative decision-making elements into the process of risk assessment and risks management. Based on their experience feedback, the authors first propose some early contributions to study the validity and the legitimacy of expertise in SSE. In the second part of the paper, the authors give an overview on how public expertise is organized in France and how the problems and the conclusions are framed in SSE. Finally, the authors propose a generic integrated framework for public expertise that constitutes the “responsible exercise of expertise”. This framework allows framing a valid and a legitimate expertise process and its conclusions.