Strategies of risk communication : observations from two participatory experiments

Abstract

On the basis of our limited experiences with planning cells, successful communication programs appear to require three essential conditions:

Communication strategies should be carefully structured and prepared. Factual information, interpretation of facts, opinions about expected outcomes, and evaluations of these outcomes should be treated separately and communicated in a different format. Communication strategies should be organized in a dialogue forum. The audience must have the opportunity to voice its concerns to the communicators, to participate in selling the agenda, and to convey its perspective to the policy maker. Comprehending risk assessment and risk management provides an appreciation of the tasks and problems of regulators and risk managers. Such appreciation is the first step in creating or sustaining trust. If policy makers are able to demonstrate the openness of the decision making process for incorporating public concern and to guarantee fairness and competence of the key actors in the decision process, trust may prevail even if the respondents do not agree with the trade-offs the decision maker has assigned to the conflicting attributes.