PRESS RELEASE
09 June 2023
Public Entities and Policies
PUBLIC RISK MANAGEMENT
Public risk management covers a wide range of issues, organisational methods and actions
relating to the State and local authorities. It differs from crisis management, which is
required once the risks have occurred; here, it is necessary to implement mitigation
measures and reaction capabilities in advance. Public authorities are required to manage
many “external” risks, i.e. to prevent them from occurring and protect the public against
their effects, but they also need to protect themselves against “internal” risks; for example,
by ensuring the continuity of their actions towards the public. The report published today
sets out to analyse the governance of public risk management, the processes it uses and the
conditions required to enable it to be tailored to ever-changing risks.
Operational risk management systems now require a thorough overhaul, to ensure a clearer
prioritisation of the risks covered
Risks affecting the public, both current and major, have long been divided into broad categories
according to their nature. At operational level, public management of these risks is focused on
specialised departments formed mainly around the ministries responsible for ecological
transition, the interior and health. These systems have been built around the activities of these
ministries associated with current risks, as well as the major disasters that France has
experienced. New measures have also been introduced or tuned to keep pace with changes in
the risks and the discovery of related risks. The result is a maze of rules, procedures and
documents, the overall coherence of which is now difficult to discern or even understand.
The State must develop a strategic vision of the risks it bears, in order to better coordinate
stakeholders in each sector and more explicitly distribute the resources it allocates to them
The management of the most serious risks and the effective coordination of local and national
stakeholders require a strategic view of public risk management, but this remains seriously
flawed. At regional level, the departmental prefect
– who is responsible for coordinating the
various actions taken by the State
– is responsible for prioritising preventive measures and for
preparing crisis management strategies via the civil protection response organisation (Orsec).
However, there are multiple levels of coordination between prefectural authorities, which
makes these prerogatives more complex to exercise. In order to coordinate with some agencies
and local authorities, it is also necessary for prefects to implement some form of collegiate
management system. Lastly, the expertise of the prefectures has suffered as a result of staff cuts
in the regional administration. At national level, each sector exercises autonomous control over
the organisational structure of its own systems. They also share neither an overall vision nor a
method for analysing and prioritising risks, and the central body responsible for national
security (SGDSN, which responds to the cabinet office) exerts little coordination on these. As a
result, coherence emerging from initiatives seems to remain scarce, and national authorities
fall short of a truly integrated vision of the scope of risks and actions taken to mitigate them.
Lastly, public resources are allocated to those various risk management measures in multiple
and various ways, which also hinders the evaluation of their cost and overall efficiency. This
should be an essential prerequisite to the State's decision whether or not to cover those risks,
and therefore to any informed allocation of public resources.
Sector-specific mechanisms must take account of the multi-dimensional nature of risks and
the consequent need for resilience
New cross-sector risks are emerging or becoming more pronounced, with the potential to
produce ripple effects and affect society in a multitude of ways. The State must now take this
into account as it rethinks its own work at global level, extending the risk management
strategies to address the challenges posed by its own dependencies and vulnerabilities. With
this in mind, crisis preparedness needs to be improved in a wider sense by feedback from
experience, and continually updated as knowledge of the risks evolves. In addition, the Court
notes that public services must also consider these risks in their own operations, as part of the
new
national resilience
strategy. However, their business continuity systems are implemented
very unevenly. The recent Covid-19 pandemic also demonstrated their inadequacy in managing
cumulative and diversified crises.
The interaction between public authorities and society in response to risks needs to be
considered and presented more explicitly, aiming for an equitable distribution of the burden
To improve public risk management, it is essential to involve civil society which expresses many
needs in this regard, and also performs an important part of concrete mitigation measures.
Consequently, the main challenges for effective public action are as follows: disseminating risk
awareness and knowledge as widely as possible, reviewing central government methods of
communicating with the public, and seeking to involve the public more closely in the
implementation of public risk management systems. Lastly, too little socio-economic analysis is
used to assess the cost of public risk management policies. As a result, it remains difficult to
estimate the costs incurred by all the stakeholders concerned by central government’s
regulatory intervention in the name of risk reduction, in response to social demand.
Read the report
PRESS CONTACTS:
Julie Poissier
◼
Head of Media & Social Networks
◼
T
+33 (0)6 87 36 52 21
◼
julie.poissier@ccomptes.fr
Eran Guterman
◼
Press Relations & Social Media Officer
◼
T
+33(0)6 11 41 46 64
◼
eran.guterman@ccomptes.fr
@Courdescomptes
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