Risk Communication

Risk communication is a community infrastructure, transactional communication process among individuals and organizations regarding the character, cause, degree, significance, uncertainty, control, and overall perception of a risk. Risk communication provides the opportunity to understand and appreciate stakeholders' concerns related to risks generated by organizations, engage in dialogue to address differences and concerns, carry out appropriate actions that can reduce perceived risks, and create [Page 753]a climate of participatory and effective discourse to reduce friction and increase harmony and mutuality.

The community infrastructure model of risk communication features building and sustaining relationships that foster discourse and the sharing of perceptions, and communication and action structures based on 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. Each concerned public has an inclination to engage in or at least support activism to exert public policy solutions to correct intolerable risk perceptions.

Risk communication public relations campaigns typically involve large organizations, such as manufacturing facilities or energy transportation lines, whose activities can pose a risk to key members of a community. Strategic risk communication contends that people in key communities need to understand the levels of risks that they suffer from working or living in proximity to risk sources, and that they can take measures that would reduce their risks by understanding the prevailing risk and collectively taking actions so that it is reduced to or does not exceed tolerable levels. Risk communication based on this shared, social relations–community infrastructural approach works to achieve a level of discourse that can treat the content issues of the risk—technical assessment—and the quality of the relationships, as well as the political dynamics of the participants.

Views on risk communication have evolved from at least three separate streams of thought to guide the way risks are calculated, evaluated, and controlled: (a) scientific positivism, whereby data and methodologies of scientists dominate community efforts to ascertain the degree of risk and subsequent communications about the risk on behalf of the community; (b) constructivism/relativism, which assumes that everyone's opinions have equal value so that no opinion is better or worse than anyone else's; and (c) dialogue, which through collaborative decision-making ensures that scientific opinion becomes integrated into policies that are vetted by key publics' values.

Risk communication began when, at least in the perception of key publics, private-sector and publicsector organizations failed to understand and exhibit appropriate levels of corporate responsibility by failing to achieve proper control of risks associated with their activities. For example, the U.S. government became deeply involved in chemicalrelated risk assessment and communication processes in response to the 1984 Bhopal 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 of 1986, title 3 of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of 1986 (SARA). Legislators believed SARA would create a communication apparatus and strategic business planning process to empower people regarding estimated risks and risk perceptions.

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