ABSTRACT
Safety issues emerge in many domains, and they have many faces. Increasingly, however, they are subsumed under a common denominator. In the Dutch National Safety and Security Strategy, for instance, safety is conceived as “…the undisturbed functioning of human beings in the Netherlands and its surroundings”. This pertains to public health threats such as epidemics, breaches in dikes and accidents in chemical plants (House of Representatives, Tweede Kamer (tk) 2006-2007, 30821: 1). The Dutch Cabinet’s request for advice, as cited in Chapter 1, follows this path. In this request, the concept of ‘safety’ is connected with a broad spectrum of policy areas: transport of hazardous substances, traffic safety, flood prevention, environmental risks and health risks. Another, increasingly mentioned threat is the so-called ‘digital paralysis’ that may emerge through the large-scale failure of ict and internet technology.
