Publication

In 2004 the Norwegian Accident Investigation Board was expanded to include a new section for road traffic. Their task, as defined by the Government, was to investigate individual road accidents, in order to find out what had actually taken place, and to construct road safety advice on the basis of their investigations. The overall ambition behind the new organisation was to reduce the number of fatalities in road traffic. In this paper, I am exploring the idea that the main task the Accident Investigation Board’s section for road traffic was to construct a new kind of narratives about road accidents, and from this perspective, I will discuss what kinds of narratives have been constructed, whether they have been productive, how they interact with various conceptions of causality, and how these narratives have been made to fit into the existing structure of road safety work in Norway. The paper is based on interviews with employees in the road safety department of the AIBN, in the Road Directorate, and in the Ministry of Transportation.