Buscando el riesgo aceptable: sobre los métodos de análisis de riesgos empleados en la elaboración de políticas públicas

Risk management becomes a difficult and inevitable task for the political decision makers today. In contemporary society new risks emerge, and they are essentially different from the risks men confronted in the past. New threats are generated by progress itself, and people demand security in an era where zero risk is unattainable. Disasters provoked by a mistaken calculus of risk have a new scale: they loose their human dimension, acquiring a new global scale. How to produce a feeling of confidence in this new society? Where can the decision maker find any help for retrieve the lost trust? The idea of acceptable risk seems a plausible solution. But there are different methods to find acceptable risks. What are the best? With a new scheme of analysis, this article shows how the different methods manage the problem of acceptable risk. We will see that none can satisfy all the equations presents in the search for an answer. Even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that they are valid ways to attain acceptable risks, we have to recognize that any of them deals with a new and fundamental equation: communication. Only through communication can political decision makers restore trust in the «risk society». Communication will enhance confidence, but only if combine certain properties: communication has to interrupt, to repeat, and to be automatic. Political decision maker needs to deal with new risks through communication, through a public marketing: the marketing of confidence.