There's no such thing as an accident these days. A few years ago, when I lived in Melbourne, I used to walk in the Edinburgh Gardens, which must be one of the city's prettiest parks. Although they're adjacent to one of white Australia's sacred sites, the former home ground of the Fitzroy Football Club, the Edinburgh Gardens positively reek of the Old Country. If you close your ears to the trams clattering up St George's Road, you could almost imagine you're strolling in a sleepy square in Bloomsbury. To complete the illusion, a locomotive apparently transported straight from the island of Sodor, mythical home to Thomas the Tank Engine stands amid the European trees. Winter and summer, children swarmed all over the retired engine, yelling and jumping from its cabin.

Then I went away for a week or so and returned to find the locomotive fenced off, out of bounds behind a freshly painted palisade of sharp white pickets. Apparently some unfortunate child had broken its arm after falling from the engine. The parents had threatened to sue the local council for failing to take adequate safeguards.

Within a few days, of course, the kids were back, giving each other boost-ups to get over the pickets, and playing happily all over the steam engine. Nothing much had changed: except that if you fell off now, you had a fair chance of impaling yourself on the fence instead of falling on the ground.

This little story has stuck in my memory ever since. It's an allegory in miniature for our very modern obsession with controlling risk. Innocent, everyday activities we once took for granted frolicking in the playground, a casual game of cricket, a short walk to the shops have become encounters with lurking dangers, episodes in a never-ending drama of damage limitation, and any of them can end up in court.

If you think I'm exaggerating, ask your local council. A recent NSW Government report found that councils are now paying out so much in damages claims that they're considering outlawing certain kinds of playground equipment. Council ovals and tennis courts, where many thousands of Australians still while away their Saturday afternoons, have become legal battlefields. The report cited the case of a dentist who broke his nose after colliding with a sightboard during a game of cricket at a local oval. He sued Canterbury Council for negligence in the Supreme Court and walked away with nearly $40,000. That's about the same as the average amount councils regularly pay out for a "trip and fall" on a footpath.

According to Shakespeare (who was simply borrowing a line from the Gospels), "there is Providence in the fall of a sparrow". In other words, nothing happens without God's knowledge or foresight. In our supposedly modern, secular society, the notion of an all-seeing, omniscient God seems quaint, and only insurance companies believe in acts of God. Yet there's a kind of paranoid theology underpinning our attitude to the risks of everyday life. If sparrows could sue, the National Parks and Wildlife Service would be in court explaining why it hadn't provided signs warning of the dangers of perching on branches. If something does happen to us, it must be someone else's fault. There's no room for plain bad luck.

Of course, it's no secret that Australians, like their American cousins, are becoming increasingly litigious. But it's interesting to ask why this should be so, in a society that in the past has prided itself on a devil-may-care attitude to danger, and whose guiding ethos encompassed notions of self-reliance, physical courage and a kind of implacable tenacity in the face of hardship and misadventure.

The anthropologist Rohan Bastin, who teaches at James Cook University and has worked in Sri Lanka for 15 years, sees an intriguing parallel between our preoccupation with lawyers and liability, and the practice of witchcraft in south Asian and African societies. As Bastin points out, in both cases fear plays a paramount role. It's irrelevant whether or not someone who believes they've been ensorcelled is suffering from some scientifically detectable ailment: the conviction of sorcery is often enough to make them sicken and die.

In illustration, Bastin quotes the Sri Lankan legend of the encounter between the god Siva and the planet Saturn. Siva hears that he has incurred the disfavour of Saturn, and is in danger of falling under Saturn's malevolent influence for seven years. So he runs away and hides in the forest. Seven years later he emerges and taunts Saturn. "Look," he says, "your power did not affect me!" "Think again," says Saturn. "Who made you hide in the forest for seven years?"

Our fear of the malevolent spirits of everyday life is not much different. Chris Vardon, president of the NSW Shires Association, reports that many community groups are now meeting in private homes because they can no longer afford to hire municipal halls. The cost of public liability insurance that councils now require in case someone trips or burns themselves on a tea urn is simply prohibitive.

As with witchcraft, it doesn't matter whether there are any real dangers lurking in your local hall. The mere fear of litigation is enough. What used to be public space is now criss-crossed with the razor wire of risk.

One of the classic ethnographic studies of witchcraft was carried out by the British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard among the Azande of central Africa in the 1920s. At the time Evans-Pritchard did his fieldwork there had been a sharp increase in the fear of witchcraft and rapid growth in the number of specialists (the original "witchdoctors") who treated the victims of witchcraft.

Bastin points out that this increasing preoccupation with sorcery came about just as the traditional structures of Azande society were undergoing rapid and radical change under the impact of European colonialism. As the world of social relations grew less stable and predictable, the Azande responded with their own version of damage limitation, attempting to make sense of what was happening to them and their society as the workings of a complex web of sorcery and counter-sorcery.

Similar impulses drive our obsession with the legal limitation of risk. In a world where traditional family structures are breaking down, and the stable relationships of lifetime employment are vanishing, we take refuge in what Bastin calls "hyper-individualism". "We become," he writes, "unpredictable and hence untrustworthy for each other." With only ourselves to blame, the magic of litigation promises a chance to assert our control over an insecure, threatening world of social relations.

Of course, there's a paradox here. Within the span of two or three generations, the lives of most people in developed Western countries have become immeasurably safer. For our grandparents and great-grandparents, the prospect that a sibling or a child of their own would die at an early age was a routine part of life, the rule rather than the exception. Diseases such as polio, diphtheria and rubella, household names even in our parents' generation, have been all but eliminated in Australia. War, famine, other catastrophes both man-made and natural all these are dangers few people in developed societies imagine they'll face in their own lifetimes.

Yet as our lives have become safer, we've become more obsessed with protecting ourselves from even the most mundane risks. Precisely because most of us no longer live with the reasonable probability that one or more of our children will die before attaining adulthood, we baulk at a broken arm.

Perhaps the most extreme form of this preoccupation with ever-diminishing risks is the middle-class neurosis about immunisation. Some parents now choose not to have their children vaccinated against illnesses such as whooping cough because of the perceived "risks" of encephalitis and brain damage. According to Health Department information, there's no scientifically proven link between the vaccine for whooping cough and brain damage in infants, and the risk of brain damage is "less than one in a million, if any at all". However, if you choose not to vaccinate a child younger than six months old and they contract the disease, the chances that they will die are about one in 200. Moreover, every unimmunised child is a potential menace to other children. Yet, if you hang around inner-city playgrounds long enough, some dangerous lunatic is bound to tell you proudly at the swings that they have "decided not to immunise".

A kind of generalised hypochondria, an obsessive-compulsive aversion to risk, has become the primary way in which many of us now experience everyday life. Yet, in many ways, we're simply responding to market forces. In the bracing, character-building brave new world of global capitalism, all of us are expected to insure ourselves individually against a superabundance of risks such as becoming ill, unemployed, under-educated or just plain old.

Anthony Giddens, court philosopher to Tony Blair's New Labour, argues that social democrats must "shift the relationship between risk and security" in the old welfare state and create a society of "responsible risk takers". The investment managers who control billions of dollars of our superannuation money like to talk about the "democratisation of risk". By this they mean that, if the market goes bottom up, it's you and me and the risk-takers next door who'll be left with the liability and the accompanying warm inner glow of responsible penury not the government, which used to guarantee our retirement incomes, and certainly not the investment managers.

In fact, the global economy now depends for its very existence on the manufacture and exchange of risk. This is the arresting thesis of Ulrich Beck, one of the most important and influential contemporary social theorists in Europe. Beck coined the term "risk society" to describe what he sees as the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of our times: that we live in a world dominated by an ever-expanding array of incalculable and uncontrollable risks. This might seem counter-intuitive at first. Surely, we might respond, science and technology have given us unprecedented control over the world, to the point where we're now on the threshold of being able to manipulate the very stuff of life itself, the genetic code of living organisms.

Beck argues that exactly the opposite is true. In fact, science and technology are themselves creating this new panoply of risk. Nuclear energy is the most obvious example; once lauded as a source of inexhaustible cheap, clean power, it's perceived since Chernobyl as the riskiest technology of all, to the point where Germany's coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens has legislated for a phased shutdown of all nuclear power plants on German soil. According to Beck, the spectre of technologically generated risk now permeates every aspect of our lives. Take the food we eat. It's no longer just food, every mouthful is potentially contaminated with all manner of artificial toxins and additives, or adulterated with genetically modified ingredients. If you're a beef eater, it may even harbour BSE.

Each of these risks is the product of a technological "advance" intended to increase yields and make modern agri-business more efficient and cost-effective. Pesticides and fertilisers were themselves part of the postwar "green revolution" which was supposed to bring an end to hunger in the developing world. In industrialised Western Europe, the practice of feeding pellets made from animal offal to normally herbivorous cattle, which enabled BSE to be transmitted across herds of cows, was an innovation introduced to make the cattle fatten faster and dispose of waste "efficiently".

For Beck, the BSE crisis is a textbook example of the risk society. So far, in Britain alone, 80 people, including children, have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) contracted by eating beef from BSE-infected cows. British scientists have predicted up to 140,000 deaths in the future. Hundreds of thousands of cattle have been slaughtered: in Britain, the financial cost to agriculture has reached more than POUNDSTE3 billion ($8 billion), and this is likely to be a fraction of the total cost across Europe.

The crisis has also exposed one of the fundamental characteristics of risk society: the deep reluctance of governments and other authorities to admit the nature and extent of such risks. The Phillips inquiry into BSE in Britain, which delivered its report late last year, found that there had been "a failure to give the public a balanced picture about risk" and that government and scientific authorities had conveyed "a false impression that BSE posed no risk to humans".

Ulrich Beck is more blunt, arguing that the refusal of most European governments to acknowledge the risks associated with BSE have allowed "an uncontrolled and uncontrollable experiment upon society". This experiment has profoundly undermined public trust in governments and scientific experts to tell us what is safe and what is not.

During the first throes of the BSE scare in Britain, Agriculture Minister John Selwyn Gummer appeared on television feeding a hamburger to his daughter and proclaiming that British beef was safe to eat. In 1999, in a bizarre re-run of Gummer's gambit, Tony Blair tried to reassure the British public that genetically modified food was harmless by eating a meal containing GM ingredients again with his daughter. Next day the tabloid Mirror newspaper hardly an organ of ecological extremism ran a front page story under the headline "Frankenstein Food", featuring a photo of Blair modified to make him look like Boris Karloff. The caption spoke volumes: Tony Blair was transformed into "The Prime Monster".

Public reaction to GM food in both Australia and Europe shows how much more sceptical ordinary citizens have grown about the pronouncements of experts, and how much more likely they are now, as a matter of gut feeling, to support the "precautionary principle" which environmentalists have been arguing for since the 1980s. The onus of proof is shifting: more and more, proponents of a new technology will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is safe before it's introduced to the mass market.

Interestingly enough, the precautionary principle is firmly entrenched in the hard-nosed world of insurance. Beck makes the point that nuclear power plants and the whole spectrum of new genetic technologies are simply uninsurable in the private market. In other words, the actuaries whose job it is to reckon up the complex mathematics of risk believe the risks associated with them are incalculable, so unknown as to make insuring them a commercially dangerous proposition. By default, then, such technologies become public, collective risks, borne by all of us. And if we bear the risk, it's only fair that we should exercise some control.

This brings us back, by a circuitous route, to the playground and the council chambers. In many ways, our tendency to go to law over more and more trivial injuries is a logical consequence of life in the global risk society. If I trip on the pavement and twist my ankle, it's an economically rational response for me to sue the council for the cost of X-rays, physiotherapy or a visit to the orthopedic surgeon. I'm simply using the mechanisms of the market to manage risk.

Yet, in so doing, I'm contributing to a cumulative process whereby public space itself becomes uninsurable; some Australian local councils have already had to go to London to get public liability insurance, because no Australian insurer would provide it at an affordable price. In future, councils may decide that it's simply too risky to provide pavements, parks and ovals, and turn the whole lot over to the private sector.

Most of us will feel this is not the kind of world we want to live in. Beck argues that it doesn't have to be this way. The flip side of risk is opportunity, and life in the global risk society opens up opportunities for a new kind of politics, based around what Beck calls "communities of risk". Ever since Chernobyl, it's been clear that the risks created by technology are global. The spread across Europe of BSE, originally thought to be the British disease, shows again that the "communities" affected by risk are as transnational as the corporate conglomerates that create them. Both the macabre history of BSE and the ongoing controversy about GM food point to a larger shift in the politics of the global risk society.

In the past, people have looked to governments to manage risk on their behalf, with the assistance of "experts" and technocrats. Over the past 20 years or so, more and more of the management of risk has been shifted to the private sector, on the assumption that banks and corporations were better able to meet the challenges of rapid technological change than plodding bureaucrats. Both these hopes have proved to be delusions.

As Beck says, citizens of the global risk society will increasingly demand an "opening up, not only of the state, but of private corporations and the sciences as well" to more scrutiny and control. This is the real meaning of the "democratisation of risk".