Governing the Unknown: How State Bureaucracies Identify, Assess, and Manage Risk

This panel brings together scholarship that examines how state bureaucracies translate the inherent ambiguity of risk into actionable categories and institutional responses. Risk is an inescapable feature of modern governance. States are constantly called upon to anticipate, classify, and respond to uncertainty — from public health crises and environmental hazards to security threats. Yet the bureaucratic processes through which risk is actually observed and governed is not usually analyzed from a sociological point of view. Drawing on James Scott's concept of legibility, we ask how bureaucratic actors render complex, heterogeneous realities into simplified, standardized forms that the state can see, measure, and act upon — and what is lost or distorted in that process. Risk, we argue, is not simply discovered by bureaucracies but actively constructed through the classificatory practices and organizational routines that make it legible (and invisible) to state institutions. At the same time, we attend to the ground level of risk governance, focusing on street-level bureaucrats and other frontline state workers -inspectors, social workers, public health officials- exercise their role in the face of uncertainty, often mediating between formal risk protocols and the messy realities they encounter in practice. It is at this interface between institutional mandate and everyday judgment that much of the actual work of risk governance unfolds. Overall, the panel looks for a sociologically grounded understanding of how states work with risk at different levels, and with what consequences for equity, accountability, and state legitimacy.