The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
Policy and institutional science studies how public decisions are made, implemented and learned from, and how institutions can be designed to govern risks that no single body owns. As a field of Policy Nexus, it focuses on consequential shared risks: those that cross sectors, levels of government and borders. This overview explains why the field matters, what experts study and how it connects to other fields.
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GeographyFor discipline and institutional issues, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, night lights and flood water, framed on Africa; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
The Policy Nexus field covers policy analysis, institutional capacity and cross-border learning focused on consequential shared risks. Experts in it study questions such as risk-informed policy and disaster risk reduction policy, with methods such as policy, institutional and decision science as well as game theory and mechanism design. Its counterparts at GCRI and GRA look at the same systems through science and finance.
Fig.How GCRI, GRF and GRA share one field while the authorities decide. Design, not a record.
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Societies often know a great deal about the risks they face and still fail to act on them in time. The reasons are institutional: mandates that split a risk between agencies, budget rules that favour response over prevention, short political cycles, weak feedback from implementation and limited trust between actors who need to cooperate. Understanding these patterns is the core of the field.
The field draws on political science, public administration, economics, law and the decision sciences. Its evidence ranges from comparative studies of institutions and statistical evaluation of policy effects to the practical knowledge of officials who have implemented reforms. Each kind of evidence has limits, and good policy analysis states which kind it rests on.
Policy also distributes risk. Decisions about where to invest, what to regulate and whom to protect shift exposure and costs between groups, regions and generations. A field that examines policy on shared risk must therefore examine fairness and legitimacy alongside effectiveness.
How risks become policy priorities and how they are defined. See Risk-informed policy.
Regulation, spending, information, incentives and institutions, compared across settings. See Disaster risk reduction policy, Climate and adaptation policy and Technology policy.
How agencies, levels of government and states cooperate. See Cross-border policy.
What happens between a policy and its outcome. See Policy implementation learning.
Who gains, who bears costs and who has a voice. See Health and social policy, Development policy and Inclusive development governance.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Disaster risk reduction | Preventing new and reducing existing disaster risk and managing residual risk, in UNDRR terminology. |
| Contingent liability | A government obligation that arises only if a particular event occurs, such as disaster relief or a guarantee being called. |
| Risk governance | The institutions, rules and processes through which risks are identified, assessed, managed and communicated, as the IRGC framework sets out. |
| Systemic risk | Risk arising from interconnections, where failure in one part can cascade through a whole system. |
Policy is where evidence from every other field meets decisions. Decision rights locates who decides what, and the counterparts below show where the same questions are studied and where their financial dimension is examined.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.