Abstract

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Abstract:: Human beings face a great challenge of risk in the modernity movement with their noble goal of pursuing security; they live in a risk society. Risks have their real existence as well as being constructed to some extent. In such a society, technocrats play an important role in defining what is the risk and providing legitimacy for risk decisionmaking. But the roles they played have such limits: their definition of risk may lead to greater risks; the quantitative and empirical methods they used to define the risk have intrinsic defects; risk management is a complex process which includes technical elements and nontechnical elements, so they can do nothing with the nontechnical problems. To increase the human ability to cope with the risk, we should further improve our risk awareness, break the experts monopoly in defining risks and open the risk decisionmaking structures, so that stakeholders can really participate in risk decision making.