Risk Management and Uncertainty in Large Complex Public Projects: What Roles for Knowledge and Public Accountancy?

Governmental actors worldwide are promoting risk management as a rational approach to man-age uncertainty and improve the abilities to deliver large complex projects according to budget, time plans, and pre-set project specifications: But what do we know about the effects of risk management on the abilities to meet such objectives? Using Callon’s (1998) twin notions of framing and overflowing we examine the implementation of risk management within the Dan-ish public sector and the effects this generated for the management of two large complex pro-jects. We show how the rational framing of risk management have generated unexpected costly outcomes such as: the undermining of the longer-term value and societal relevance of the built asset, the negligence of the wider range of uncertainties emerging during project processes, and constraining forms of knowledge. We also show how expert accountants play a complex and unexpected role. As they implement a rational approach to risk management to manage uncer-tainty, the accounting experts simultaneously co-produce the costly overflows that challenge the successful completion of the projects, i.e. they actively produce new uncertainty.