The Exxon Mobil oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico this past year brought to light one of the most unfortunate aspects of the socio-technical systems that define our society. Because of the complexity and technical sophistication of our most critical infrastructures and crucial goods and services the parties responsible for making regulatory decisions are often not in possession of the data required to make decisions about risk mitigation and management that offer the most public protection, especially in the context of disaster response and risk management. This becomes more of a problem when the environment in which these decisions are promulgated is characterized by a lack of trust between the regulator, the regulated, and third-party beneficiaries.
In an environment where trust exists between the regulated and regulator, opportunities for mutual collaboration towards broader social goals may be more prevalent. These opportunities may also be more likely to be identified, formulated, and implemented in ways that my promote more trust and improve overall efficiencies both regulatory and economic. But when trust is broken, the adversarial nature of the regulatory relationship can bring gridlock.
We are very familiar with the image of gridlock in a transportation network from our time stuck in traffic during rush hour in many of our North American cities, and 2011 has made us more and more acquainted with partisan gridlock in Congress, but what about regulatory gridlock? I am stil thinking this one through but am borrowing from the idea of economic gridlock developed by Daniel Heller to construct these ideas. In my opinion, regulatory gridlock occurs when, in an adversarial arrangement, the intended consequences of a complex technical system (CTS) are well known and integrated while the undesirable consequences of a CTS’s deployment are unpredictable and fragmentary. The adversarial relationship makes it nearly impossible to facilitate effective communication between owners of the CTS that has failed and the stakeholders who are affected. In addition, the adversarial relationship activates a feedback loop between perceived transparency of the CTS innovation cycle within the CTS ownership and the willingness of stakeholders to accept non-zero risk. As this feedback loop promotes increased negative perception of transparency and decreased willingness to accept risk, risk mitigation becomes less economically effective while increasing the overall costs to society of CTS management and innovation.
In 2012, as economic and political pressure to make government more efficient and promote economic recovery increases, will we see the need for navigating this potential gridlock increase? How will we address this challenge, ensuring that the potential for disasters doesn’t divert our focus from the important work of improving our economic and social welfare through technological innovation within our lifeline infrastructures?