NCRM Placement Fellowship: National Security Risk Management Spending

Placement organisation: Government Office for Science
Researcher: Corinna Elsenbroich, University of Surrey
Placement duration: January 2018 - July 2018

The placement is a unique opportunity to conduct method innovation work in collaboration with policy makers across a range of departments.

Situated in GO Science and in collaboration with the Cabinet Office the project is a review of the methodology of the National Security Risk Assessment. The project has three main goals:

1. to increase transparency of the NSRA and coherence across risks,
2. integrate subjective wellbeing into the impact assessment,
3. allow for the modelling of upstream and downstream policy.

Research is currently focusing on the possibility of using Bayesian Networks to model National Security Risks. This framework has the potential of providing a coherent and transparent framework across risks and threats. Bayesian approaches furthermore have the advantage that they can integrate different kinds of information, from hard quantitative data to subjective stakeholder opinions. The challenges of this project are to understand the viability of using Bayesian Networks for the NSRA, how to formulate the data collection for the analysis and how to integrate the approach into the policy process.