Commentary: Risk and Causality: The Contribution of Policy Researchers to Public Decisions

In his introduction to the translation into French of Max Weber's famous conferences on science and politics, Raymond Aron makes the insightful suggestion that public decisions must start with two distinct <i>conjectures</i> (Aron 1963: 11). One concerns the risks arising from policy action, or inaction, in a situation or context that is always unique and peculiar, and the other, the uncertainty attached to the results of the action. Greatly simplified, because a decision is rarely made by only one person, outside an institution and the constraints that follow, a decision maker's first order of business is to consider the many consequences that may stem from intervening (or not) to change a situation or solve a problem (Tong 1987). In parallel, the decision maker will want evidence that the measures that are considered can succeed, based on experience or by default, on some plausible "theory" of social action (Edenhofer and Kowarsch 2019).