IV. Policy, Institutions, and Impacts

The chapters in this, the final section, of the collection are drawn together by their shared concern with the question of “what is to be done?”. While every chapter in this volume has shared the desire to understand extreme global risk as a means of reducing it, these chapters focus on the policies, institutions, and processes that are needed to achieve this goal. While these chapters are markedly different in terms of their objects of concern (covering everything from national institutions and policy to global diplomacy and institutional investors), the heuristics with which they understand the possibility of extreme global risk and why we should care about it (ranging from “internal” institutional logics to abstract ethical ideals), and indeed the nature of the proposals proffered as to what might be done about them (including specific policies and institutions and more general proposals, frameworks, and research agendas), we can still usefully trace similarities and common themes across each of them.

Foremost among these is their direct interest in shaping actual policies, institutional behaviours, and governance priorities in the real world. There is a long tradition in existential risk research, dating back to the work of people like Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells, to believe that extreme global risks demand ideal solutions such as “world government”, total surveillance, or revolutions in human behaviour. However, these chapters are all solidly grounded in the realities of the 21st century policy landscape. In Chapter 23, Financing Our Final Hour, for example, the authors build an impressive and empirically robust case for the urgent necessity for institutional investors to take seriously their responsibilities to the people and planet that their profits are predicated upon by adhering to a Financial Hippocratic Oath. Chapter 21, It Takes a Village: The Shared Responsibility of Raising an Autonomous Weapon, by contrast, presents a study of how to translate notions of shared responsibility and the embedding of strong norms into the back-and-forth of defence policy, technological design, and military procurement. Despite the varied focus of the chapters in this section, they each present an approach to deploying empirically robust, intellectually ambitious, and contextually sensitive research into policy proposals, engagement tools, and other forms of policy engagement.

The types of policy work undertaken across these chapters is far from uniform. The proposals developed in the chapters range from the pragmatic to the speculative, and the approaches advocated by the authors range from emphasising the requirement for evidence and informed decision-making through to means of fostering dialogue and embracing uncertainty.

Another common theme among the chapters gathered here is that they are concerned — in one way or another — with questions that go beyond issues of necessity and duress (that is, what simply must be done if we are to survive at all) and also look towards how social, political, and economic conditions more amenable to human and planetary survival might be fostered. Again, the chapters take a variety of approaches to exploring these questions. Chapter 22 examines the ways that future generations might be best represented in the policy-making process of the present, while in Chapter 20, Paul Ingram’s account of fostering dialogue and acceptance in the fraught and (perhaps necessarily) adversarial world of nuclear disarmament diplomacy prompts us to directly consider the ways that work in the field can open up spaces where the politics of possibility can come more clearly into view. That is not to say that these chapters are idealistic or utopian, although they sketch possibilities of existential hope, futures where better decision making at many levels can both safeguard us from catastrophic futures and guide us towards better ones. However, in contrast to some earlier work in the field of Existential Risk Studies, they do not make any claims about what kind of future would be best for humanity, and indeed make suggestions that would bring human futures under greater democratic control, leaving this as a question that individuals are left to answer for themselves.

Still, imagining what might be possible is central to any work that talks about the conditions of the future — whether its ostensible concern is the mitigation of risk, or the fostering of a utopia. The contributions in this section are perhaps conspicuous in this sense, primarily for the directness with which they explore these political, ontological, and normative relationships between our present and our possible futures. In asking how a researcher or policy-maker might contribute towards the attainment of a safer or more survivable future through the development of policy or through influencing the trajectory or structure of institutions, the authors each draw us towards important foundational assumptions related to both how we understand the world as it is, and how we imagine it ought to be. In this way, whilst also providing rich accounts of how policies and institutions might evolve in response to research and understanding of specific or systemic catastrophic risks, the chapters also provide an opportunity to reflect on some of the underlying factors that condition work in the field — with a range of perspectives on political, social, geographic and temporal relationalities presented by the authors. Thus, Chapter 19, The Cartography of Global Catastrophic Governance, charts the concentrations of different governance efforts related to catastrophic risks areas and argues for both greater attention and greater coordination, while Chapter 18, Pathways to Linking Science and Policy in Global Risk, provides ideas for researchers to identify pathways to impact for their own work.

The section opens with two chapters that provide a general summary of the current state of policy around extreme global risk. Chapter 18 is based on an assessment of six policy engagement activities at CSER, reflecting on the meaning of impactful research and highlighting the different ways in which this can be achieved. The chapter provides a call to arms for all researchers in this space to embed impact within their research but also highlights the importance of setting clear goals for this activity and of practicing continuous evaluation to ensure that these are being met.

Chapter 19 charts the efficacy and concentration of different GCR governance efforts, proposing a typology that allows for comparisons based on risk focus, institutional arrangement, and effectiveness of implementation. The chapter draws attention to those areas that have received more significant attention, and those which have thus far been under-attended to as either drivers of catastrophic risk or as factors that determine the vulnerability of a society to GCRs. Overall, the authors argue that several GCR hazards (climate change, nuclear weapons) are covered by international law but often inadequately. They note that institutions often lack clear enforcement and compliance mechanisms, or have been unable to address the underlying collective action problem. Other issues, such as solar geoengineering, catastrophic uses of AI, some areas of ecological collapse, the chapter argues to be relatively neglected. Just as understanding the drivers and catalyst of catastrophic events is complex, so too is understanding the differential landscape of efforts to govern these risk areas. The landscape across GCR governance is fragmented and mandates both within and across different hazards and vulnerabilities. The authors do note, however, that there are a number of approaches that can be taken to enhance understanding of GCRs and to increase resilience to them even in the face of a high degree of uncertainty.

The remaining chapters focus on specific proposals for reducing extreme global risk within particular contexts and targeted at different actors. In Chapter 20, Paul Ingram provides an account that sheds light on the ways that the challenges of developing fit-for-purpose policy (which were highlighted at a macro-level in the taxonomy of Chapter 19) can play out at the level of international and interpersonal relationships within the context of nuclear diplomacy. Ingram’s reflexive account draws our attention not only to the geopolitical competitions and power differentials that can frustrate idealised imaginaries of global cooperation to reduce the potential for global disasters, but also reminds us that we cannot — in our efforts to understand problems of global scale — leave out the realities, constraints, and possibilities that are created and perpetually re-negotiated by both people and states. Indeed, while Ingram’s aim in this chapter is to explicate his “Stepping Stones” approach, and to provide some generalisable insights into how open dialogue and iterative processes embrace the potentiality created by even the most modest of incremental change, it is also a welcome re-insertion of the international into our discussion of how to think through the global. Ingram’s close attention to navigating relationality, and his central drive to open up spaces of possibility, makes his contribution to this volume a provocative and pedagogically engaging one. If there is a core message conveyed by his chapter, it is a straightforward but powerful one: just because things are as they are, we should not assume that they need to be that way, nor that they cannot be changed.

Several of the chapters here rely heavily on the appeal to a central metaphor. For Kemp and Rhodes in Chapter 19, it is the mapping of a landscape, for Ingram, it is the image of the act of crossing an obstacle (and perhaps meeting in the middle) using stepping stones. In Chapter 21, Avin and Jayanata rely instead on an aphoristic analogy, creatively deploying a communitarian imaginary of child nurturing to frame their discussion of LAWS governance. Whereas Kemp and Rhodes examine the difference between different extant approaches to GCR governance, and Ingram reflects on the layered inter-relationality between individuals and between those with shared and competing visions, Avin and Jayanata look instead towards the relationships between different elements of a complex sociotechnical system: the development, use, and regulation of Lethal Autonomous Weapons. The chapter recounts the results and insights garnered over the course of a series of interviews with experts based across the UK, that were framed as a mock parliamentary inquiry. The key findings concerned a lack of accountability and the malleability of concepts such as “meaningful human control” that can become unhelpfully restrictive and reductive if principles of collective responsibility are not embedded in the process of creating, procuring, training with, and using autonomous weapons.

Their contribution is instructive in demonstrating the sometimes less visible contingency and specificity of institutional and regulatory arrangements that bely the technological artifacts that are the focus of risk research and governance. When we consider, for example, the potentialities of an autonomous weapon or a neural network, we are in fact considering a far larger, more diffuse and complex web of people, institutions, manufacturers, rules, and norms that must be considered within a richer account of a technology and its effects.

Making sense of catastrophe is difficult. Contributions throughout the volume, show us that some scholars have approached this difficulty by embracing truly global approach to extreme global risks — understanding risks within a framework that engages explicitly with both the planet, and humanity as totalities where hazards and vulnerabilities must be measured against the world, its population and its future at the level of their largest aggregations. The chapters in this section explore some of the ways that both ethical imperatives — concerning generational inequity and representation — and observable complexities (such as the interrelationships between, and concentrations of governance within, different risk areas and the asymmetric distribution of vulnerabilities to them) can be illuminated and further explored through a variety of different case-studies in policy development or institutional change. In Chapter 22, for example, Natalie Jones explores the contours of an argument concerning the ethical imperative to consider the equal standing, and rights of, future generations. The case might initially appear reminiscent of calls from the utilitarian aspects of what earlier contributions to this volume labelled the “TUA” — yet Jones’ treatment of the issue as one that troubles the boundaries of democratic norms, and which requires ethical sensitivity rather than moral doctrine, leads her to produce a work that is both pragmatic in its development of recommendations yet nuanced in its treatment of what is generalisable and what is contextually specific.

Jones examines the development of future generations policies in a number of states, including Scotland, Israel, Finland and Hungary. The chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of different types of institutional arrangements for the representation of future people in present day governance processes, whilst further developing a set of recommendations on the basis of both an assessment of the UK specific context and the comparative analysis of existing policies. Foremost among these is the recommendation for creating a APPG for Future Generations — a recommendation that was taken up by Parliament in 2017 due to the direct efforts of the chapter authors with the support of CSER.

The final chapter in this section, and indeed in the collection as a whole, is Financing Our Final Hour by Kemp, Belfield, Quigley, Weitzdörfer, and Beard. This transitions from a focus on governments and international bodies to considering private sector responsibilities and, in particular, the role of large institutional investors. The chapter was developed over a number of years as a collective response to challenging moral, political, and economic discussions around the global divestment from the Fossil Fuels campaign, alternative approaches for financial institutions to tackle climate change, and the relevance of these to other sources of extreme global risk. This work helped to influence the University of Cambridge in its decision to divest from fossil fuels in 2021, with Dr Quigley taking a secondment to the university’s Chief Financial Officer to help develop this policy. However, this chapter presents the totality of this work for the first time. The chapter considers both the (ethical, legal, financial, and prudential) reasons why large institutional investors should care about global risk and the different tactics available to them to achieve these aims. Ultimately it concludes that all institutional investors have reason to adopt policies to stop contributing to extreme global risk, but that the very largest, so-called “universal owners” that represent an entire slice of the global economy should go beyond this and actively use their investments to reduce global risk by all available means.

It should of course go without saying that the policies and proposals presented in this section provide only a small subset of the many actions that are required to achieve the goal of reducing the level of extreme global risk, as well as the many more targeted proposals designed to tackle climate change, biosecurity threats, nuclear war, natural global-scale disasters, and the responsible innovation and deployment of new technologies. We have selected these chapters, and the chapters in this volume more generally, to be representative of a diversity of ways of thinking, united in their concern to understand and reduce extreme global risk and their commitment to contribute to an open, pluralistic, transparent, and robust field of Existential Risk Studies, but divergent in their community of stakeholders, method of construction, and locus of concern. Ultimately our hope is not that anyone should read these chapters and know what needs to be done to reduce extreme global risk, but rather that they will read these chapters and gain a better understanding of the gaps that must be filled in order to achieve this aim, and a confidence that they too can play a role in filling these.