New Perspectives on Risk Communication

Uncertainty in a Complex Society

Asa Boholm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317981886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

That risk communication ranks high on the policymaking agenda is beyond discussion today. The field is a point of intersection of social communication, practical management and policy making. It covers such diverse activities as to inform and educate the public about risk, and risk management in order to influence attitudes and behaviour, to act in situations of emergency or crises, to aid in decision-making and to assist in conflict resolution. Communication has grown into a major concern in current risk governance based on network co-ordinated management of public affairs conducted by authorities and companies and is recognized as a key component in the government of risk. This is especially salient in policy fields relating to environmental planning and resource management, urban planning, chemical and food regulation, or infrastructure planning, development and maintenance. This book explores risk communication research with a focus on new theoretical perspectives, research findings, and applied goals. It reflects on a broad range of innovative theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and empirical areas. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Risk Research.

Introduction

Risk communication is a point of intersection of social communication, practical management and policy-making. It covers such diverse activities as to inform and educate the public about risk, and risk management in order to influence attitudes and behaviour, to act in situations of emergency or crises, to aid in decision-making and to assist in conflict resolution. Communication has grown into a major concern in current risk governance based on network co-ordinated management of public affairs conducted by authorities and companies (Swyngedouw 2005) and is recognized as a key component in the government of risk (Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin 2004). This is especially salient in policy fields relating to environmental planning and resource management, urban planning, chemical and food regulation, or infrastructure planning, development and maintenance. Polarization between the perceptions of lay publics on the one hand, and regulators, scientific experts and project proponents on the other has been a key issue in risk communication research (Petts and Brooks 2006). The field involves several distinctions, including that between expert and laymen, between those affected by decision and those who make the decisions, between conflict and co-operation, between facts and values, and between inclusion and exclusion in decision processes (for a recent overview of the field see Palencher and Heath 2007).

When the risk communication field was new, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, inspiration came from psychological research on how people assess risk information (Fischhoff1995). It was shown that people when they make judgements about risk do not compute statistical information. They rely on heuristics – short cuts of information processing that simplify information – which often makes some risks more salient than others (Slovic 2000). The early rationale for risk communication research derived from the identified divide between the scientific way to assess risk (based on calculations of probability and estimated ‘loss’) and the lay people approach which tended to over- or underestimate risk. Hence risk communication initially adopted a pedagogical mission to teach the public about real risk so that they can act ‘rationally’ and make informed choices about what risks to take or not to take (see Leiss 1996, for an overview).

Over the last 15 to 20 years this technocratic approach has been gradually abandoned and today it is widely recognized that public values and preferences must be included in risk assessment and management (Renn 1998). Focus has moved to an emphasis on deliberation and dialogue processes, often with a normative element. Risk communication researchers have argued that communicators and audience must listen to each other and learn from one another (Petts 2001). Emphasis has shifted from education, framed as the monitoring of behaviour and attitude change induced from technocratic expertise, to consensus building and conflict resolution.

A dominant paradigm in risk communication has been a technical sender-receiver model stating that a message travels from a sender via some kind of channel or medium to a receiver. A condition for communication is that a message can be packaged into a signal according to a code and that both sender and receiver use the same coding device for packaging and unpacking messages. Communication failure occurs when the message at the receiver’s end differs significantly from the message dispatched from the sender either due to distortion from ‘noise’ during transmission or due to discrepant coding and decoding. The Shannon and Weaver (1949) model originally focused on communication in a technical sense, including machines, but the model has also been widely applied to social communication in human interaction. The social amplification of risk framework which has been influential in risk communication research (see Pidgeon, Kasperson, and Slovic 2003) can be seen as a development of the Shannon-Weaver model. The distortion of risk messages is attributed to ‘noise’ in the channelling of a risk signal by means of various socially induced attenuations or amplifications of the signal (for example by the media, industry, interest groups, academics, or stakeholders).

In risk communication studies Jürgen Habermas’s (1985) normative theory of communicative rationality has been advocated as an alterative to the Shannon-Weaver model. Following Habermas, it has been argued that communication should be a dialogue between actors who are willing to listen to each other and who are open to change their minds and positions on a certain issue depending on how the deliberative process unfolds (see for example Renn 2004). By means of dialogue, pluralities of viewpoints, evaluations and prioritizations can be considered which promotes sensible decision-making on collective and often controversial matters imbued by risk and uncertainty. Trust between participants is a crucial condition for dialogue (Petts 2001). In reality however social communication does not adhere to this ideal. Human communication is part of social interaction and can be cooperative as well as conflictive depending on many things such as social conventions, expectations, social roles and identities, power relations, and interpretations of meanings (Allwood 1978).

That risk communication ranks high on the policy-making agenda is beyond discussion today. But what current developments can be discerned with regard to risk communication as a research field? What is the theoretical status and use of the sender-receiver model and the dialogue model for communication? Are there other theoretical trends, and in such case, what are they? In order to find answers to those questions a research conference with the title ‘New perspectives on risk communication: uncertainty in a complex society’ was arranged in Göteborg, Sweden in August–September 2006. The aim was to stimulate a broad inter-disciplinary discussion on risk communication as a research field with a focus on new theoretical perspectives, research findings, and applied goals.

The conference which was funded by the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning, the Swedish Emergency Management Agency, the Swedish Research Council, the School of Public Administration, Gothenburg University, and the Centre for Public Sector Research, Gothenburg University, attracted 90 participants from 14 countries representing 58 institutional affiliations. In all, 60 academic papers were presented. This special issue of the Journal of Risk Research includes a selection of these papers together with a viewpoint paper on risk communication with commentaries. This volume reflects the broad range of theoretical perspectives, methodological and empirical foci that risk communication can incorporate and which makes it such a challenging and exciting field.

References

Allwood, J. 1978. On the analysis of communicative action. Gothenburg Papers in Theoretical Linguistics 38, Dept of Linguistics, Göteborg University. [Also in The Structure of Action, ed. P. Brenner, 168–91.] Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Fischhoff, B. 1995. Risk perception and communication unplugged: twenty years of process. Risk Analysis 15, no. 2: 137–45.

Habermas, J. 1985. The theory of communicative action. Cambridge: Beacon Press.

Hood, C., H. Rothstein, and R. Baldwin. 2004. The government of risk. Understanding risk regulation regimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Leiss, W. 1996. Three phases in the evolution of risk communication practice. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 545: 85–94.

Palenchar, M.J., and R.L. Heath. 2007. Strategic risk communication: Adding value to society. Public Relations Review 33: 120–9.

Petts, J. 2001. Evaluating the effectiveness of deliberative processes: waste management case-studies. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 44, no. 2: 207–26.

Petts, J., and C. Brooks. 2006. Expert conceptualisations of the role of lay knowledge in environmental decision making: Challenges for deliberative democracy. Environment and Planning (A) 38: 1045–59.

Pidgeon, N., R.E. Kasperson, and P. Slovic, eds. 2003. The social amplification of risk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Renn, O. 1998. Three decades of risk research: Accomplishments and new challenges. Journal of Risk Research 1, no. 1: 49–71.

———. 2004. Participatory processes for designing environmental policies. Land Use Policy 23: 34–43.

Shannon, C.E., and W. Weaver. 1949. The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Slovic, P. 2000. The perception of risk. London: Earthscan.

Swyngedouw, E. 2005. Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governance-beyond-the-state. Urban Studies 42, no. 11: 1991–2006.

Åsa Boholm
CEFOS, Gothenburg University, Sweden

Risk communication: world creation through collective learning under complex contingent conditions

Piet Strydom
Department of Sociology, University College Cork, Ireland

Risk communication, in the full sense of the word, is a discursive event in which speakers advance claims in the face of other responding participants before a general public. The presence of the public leads the participants to evaluate what happens in moral terms, with the result that their claims obtain an unavoidable normative quality and the discursive event takes the form of a public controversy which puts pressure on the participants to coordinate their disagreements. Proceeding from the assumption of socially distributed and shared cognition, the core argument of this paper is that risk communication, in the final analysis, is a cooperative learning process in and through which a communication community constructively arrives at a diagnostic interpretation of its common situation, the challenge it faces, and possible ways of dealing with it. Since such learning is possible only under conditions of relatively high complexity and contingency, however, its characteristic non-linear dynamic development makes uncertainty both many-sided and unavoidable. Often, however, such a collective achievement is put beyond reach, not simply because of complexity, contingency and uncertainty, but rather because the agents or groups involved follow one or other of a number of strategies which effectively block learning. Were the social sciences to contribute to the enhancement of risk communication (e.g., by facilitating value- and will-formation in the face of concrete problems), they should study the multi-levelled process of risk communication in the different communicative-discursive contexts within which it takes place with a view to clarifying the learning processes and potentials they harbour. Crucial here are the normative standards appealed to and the degree of legitimacy they allow. Not merely the management of uncertainty depends on this, but also the very world brought into being through risk communication.

Introduction

By ‘risk communication’, to begin with, I understand a broad societal phenomenon which is of a historically specific nature. It made its appearance in the late twentieth century risk society as part of the public discourse about risk and responsibility. And, in the meantime, it has become the characteristic feature, the signature as it were, of early twenty-first-century society. Historically, therefore, it is comparable to the ‘poverty communication’ of the nineteenth century and the ‘violence communication’ of the early modern period (Strydom 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2002). This means that risk communication is a multi-levelled process that includes all communication, all the different streams or strands of communication, about the central issue of our time: the issue of risk which has increased communication in the past number of decades to such an unprecedented degree.

An adequate understanding of risk communication is possible, therefore, only in the context of the risk society and, more specifically, the public discourse about risk and responsibility. What such contextualization allows one to do, is to appreciate the complexity of the conditions under which risk communication takes place and, hence, also the multi-levelled or differentiated nature of risk communication itself. The unfolding of this discourse during the second half of the twentieth century revealed the different streams or strands which go into the makeup of risk communication together with their respective vehicles (Strydom 2002). Whereas risk communication at the outset took the form of closed elite communication about the level of acceptable safety, it later progressively broadened into a form of public communication about the societal production and constitution of risk. In the 1950s, experts in the nuclear industry and regulators were both senders and receivers of risk communication. By the 1970s, however, social movement organizations have entered the ranks of risk communicators and started to address ordinary members of society. Since then, a significant proportion of the citizenry has become sufficiently concerned and involved to provide the spawning ground of both ideas and organizations feeding into risk communication.

It is remarkable that whereas the discursive logic generated by risk communication for decades sharply divided those affected, even leading to destructive conflict, it has given rise in the course of time to discursive means for the potential coordination of divergent orientations and actions. This suggests that risk communication, in the final analysis, is a cooperative learning process in and through which a communication community arrives at a constructive diagnostic interpretation of its common situation, the challenge it faces, and possible ways of dealing with it, thus creating a form of life for its members.

The social scientific study of risk communication, then, must take into account a number of things: the historically coloured societal conditions of co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Risk communication: world creation through collective learning under complex contingent conditions
• 3. Creating shared realities through communication: exploring the agenda-building role of the media and its sources in the E. coli contamination of a Canadian public drinking water supply
• 4. Narratives of risk
• 5. Resilience at risk: epistemological and social construction barriers to risk communication
• 6. Scientised citizens and democratised science. Re-assessing the expert-lay divide
• 7. Risk communication, prenatal screening, and prenatal diagnosis: the illusion of informed decision-making
• 8. Lead is like mercury: risk comparisons, analogies and mental models
• 9. The public meeting as a theatre of dissent: risk and hazard in land use and environmental planning
• 10. What environmental and technological risk communication research and health risk research can learn from each other
• 11. Communities of risk research and risk practice: divided by a common language?
• 12. Meaningful communication among experts and affected citizens on risk: challenge or impossibility?
• 13. Risk and safety communication in small enterprises — how to support a lasting change towards work safety priority
• 14. Audiovisual risk communication unravelled: effects on gut feelings and cognitive processes
• 15. The illusion of economic objectivity: linking local risks of credibility loss to global risks of climate change
• 16. Risk management in Swedish forestry — Policy formation and fulfilment of goals
• 17. The text and the tale: differences between scientific reports and scientists' reportings on the eruption of Mount Chance, Montserrat
• 18. Governing the sea rescue service in Sweden: communicating in networks
• 19. Wrestling with uncertain risks: EU regulation of GMOs and the uncertainty paradox
• Index