Earth scientists engaged in the governance of volcanic unrest currently provide advice within an historically benign risk governance environment with few scrutiny pressures. That environment is characterised by the early stages of regulation by laws, legal institutions and regulatory agencies, inadequate or absent professional self-regulation and accordingly few institutional risks or resulting blame-related behaviours.
The current role of earth science and earth scientists appears to be divisive, ill-defined, unstructured and poorly recorded. It is being challenged.
Most earth science discourses leave unchallenged the top-down "decisionist" linear model of risk governance that starts with hazard assessment, moves to risk assessment and ends with risk management. This model emerged in the USA in the 1980's and has since received wide (but not universal) acceptance. It is based upon the premise that science (fact) and politics (value) can and should be separated and, while science can influence policy-making, policy-making in no way influences the science of hazard assessment.
Although knowledge (the world of fact) and value (the normative world) are analysed differently, their separation has been described as naïve whilst their interaction is clear and inevitable. Existing linear models ("decisionist" and "technocratic models) are under pressure. More modern accretions (such as attempts to incorporate experiential knowledge in assessment and relative frequencies or probabilities within management processes) have not been integrated in a coherent, transparent, effective or rational way.
The existing models need to be reviewed and compared with an alternative "transparent/inclusive" model advocating "contemporary conceptions of risk governance" and supporting an open, cyclical, iterative and inter-linked process that places greater emphasis on effective risk communication throughout the governance process. Social science discourses go some way to explaining the history and current theoretical status of existing governance frameworks (and the role of scientists within them) and offer useful guidance as to the challenges (and possible solutions) that may lie ahead.
Further, the status of risk itself has changed and is still changing. This has caused inevitable confusion and tension between risk governance stakeholders. Recent Human Rights cases, the L'Aquila, Italy criminal convictions and a recent compensation case in the Supreme Court in Chile give timely warnings of the vulnerabilities that can be exposed when scrutinisers, within a legal process, show post facto interest in governance actors and actions.
Future governance communities will be scrutinised by a variety of risk stakeholders with different and competing agendas within an expanding array of real-time mass and social media options. A growing conflict between the control of primary societal and secondary institutional risks may evolve with the consequences of blame mitigation behaviours becoming more evident.
There is an urgent need for the current roles and working practices of scientists to be assessed robustly to determine whether they are appropriate for a less benign environment and, if not, for reasoned redesigns to be considered. Relevant scientific communities are well aware of the problem but seem slow and/or ill-equipped to take the first step towards identifying, defining and proposing a new model (both theoretical and practical) for the role and better related working practices.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Richard Bretton; Jo gottsman; Ryerson Christie (2014), "The future role of Earth Scientists," https://theghub.org/resources/3317.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. Risk Governance