Chapter 2

Combining governmentality and discourse analysis

This chapter introduces a governmentality approach to issues of risk and safety, and carves out an analytical framework that combines it with appraisal analysis. From the perspective of governmentality, responsibilisation is the social process whereby actors assign/assume various moral duties that benefit governing purposes. Institutions and organisations are also increasingly trying to involve and motivate people to manage risk themselves and thus ‘partner’ with them in large-scale tasks of improving health and safety. Appraisal analysis can help demonstrate how actors evaluate risks and safety measures and how they assume or resist positions of responsibility. The analytical model proposed more specifically aids an examination of how actors appraise (a) what are risks and what should be protected; (b) safety measures spanning collective and individual protection (or lack thereof); and (c) safety measures spanning behavioural prompts and risk elimination. Choices along these dimensions stand in a dialectical relationship to certain pervasive, global discourses of risk governance. Focus group discussions on a nuclear power plant (NPP) accident scenario are analysed, for which state agencies plan to recover contaminated neighbourhoods. The analysis shows that an enduring inconsistency in the policy of governing risk through the logic of recovery and individualised responsibility is a risk mitigation strategy that requires that the risk be considered tolerable by those who are to face it – a condition that is met only partially. It is therefore likely that such a policy will be met with resistance in the event of a nuclear accident, as it was after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.