Infrastructural Risk Communication

Decades of risk management and risk communication research argue for an infrastructural risk communication orientation. While a more thorough explication of risk communication developed from numerous perspectives is provided in the Risk Communication entry in this encyclopedia, an infrastructural approach to risk reasons that individual, expert, and community efficacy are focal points for determining whether a community is properly organized to plan and communicate about various risks.

The infrastructural risk communication perspective features building and sustaining relationships that foster discourse leading to shared perceptions; communication and decision/action structures can and must produce shared meanings across varied and multiple constituencies, issues, and levels of understanding. Risk assessors and communicators realize that each key public makes an idiosyncratic response to each risk based on its unique decision heuristic. A fully functioning society is aware of risk or at least does its best to be aware of, assess, discuss, and develop plans tailored to particular risk-bearing communities and their individual and group unique risk decision heuristics.

Fundamental questions offered by numerous scholars about functionalism and public relations pertain directly to infrastructural risk communication. Is the management function of public relations and risk communication based on a model that sees system imperatives as best managed when publics (risk bearers) are safeguarded from the complexities of policy, management, and operational decisions? Or can public relations and [Page 454]risk communication be a rhetorical process that facilitates genuine discussion and critique of policy, management, and operational questions?

Numerous studies have shown that simply providing information is not very effective in allaying public concern over a risk, with an over-reliance on the power of information while failing to recognize power inequities and compliance. Risk democracy is a central theme within infrastructural risk communication, and in association with various experts, individual voices of risk bearers ideally must be brought together to create systems and shared perspectives that appropriately assess, mitigate, and respond to risks that may be unevenly borne throughout any community or larger society. This move reflects the general trend of risk communication from the power of information within education to one of consensus building through dialogue based on access to the decision-making systems within the infrastructure of risk management.

The infrastructural risk communication approach builds on key psychometric variables, such as trust, control, and uncertainty, combined with a community construction of the meaning and the communication and management of risk through the lens of rhetorical heritage. Uncertainty governs the risk communication process. In turbulent times, uncertainty and distrust soar. Highly involved people struggle to control sources of risks that affect their self-interests. Information and knowledge become less relevant to the need to exert control because they are only loosely related to risk tolerance.

For example, the U.S. government became deeply involved in chemical-related risk assessment and communication processes in response to the 1984 Bhopal (India) chemical spill, which motivated elected representatives and citizens to question whether similar risks loomed near their homes or at their work locations. Addressing such concerns, federal legislators created the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) of 1986, Title 3 of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA). Legislators believed these acts would create a communication apparatus and strategic business planning process to empower people regarding estimated risks and risk perceptions.

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