Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Risk and crisis communication constitutes a rich field of expertise and practices. For a long time, it has been mainly viewed and still is, as a practical rather than a theory-based approach. Numerous manuals and “how-to” books have been published over the last decades. It is often believed that they provide more recipes, refined over the years, than solid scientific literature upon which an evidence-based risk and crisis communication strategy can be developed and fostered. This review is based partially on a surprise: contrary to what was expected, there is an abundant stock of theories and approaches, albeit very diverse. The intention of this chapter is to guide the reader through some of them, considered, maybe over hastily, as the most prominent. The objective is not to produce an exhaustive review, but rather to provide an orientation in a field, whose popularity is growing throughout industries, companies, public health institutions, and public services.

This chapter addresses the participation of civil society in the debate on industrial risk in France. The body of research regarding citizen participation, notably in environmental issues, is substantial, as is the literature on industrial risk perception. However, given the multitude of participatory systems and experiments, the dialogue between hazardous companies and their local host communities merits further analysis. The findings summarized here are mainly based on French case studies in the major industrial zones of the Rhône Valley, Dunkirk, Le Havre and Marseille. [In addition, FonCSI supported international works, notably a study in Norway and the US by M. Baram and P. Lindøe (Cf. Chapter “”, ).] These studies focused on the topic of ‘living together with hazardous industry’, examined the Technological Risk Prevention Plan (PPRT), the functioning of institutional communication/consultation bodies and local initiatives to encourage participation in industrial risk. The results showed that the opportunity not only to be informed on industrial risk but also to participate in the debate was sometimes underused by the public. These studies help us understand the factors that can undermine communication and participation processes with respect to industrial risk in France.

Crisis response preparedness is a problematic issue for local governments. It is a responsibility with high stakes, but at the same time it is very distant from the daily management of the community. In France, local governments engage to a limited extent with preparedness by designing crisis response plans, which very often lack operationality. This paper examines the contribution of risk communication to effective crisis response preparedness. Indeed, technical and organizational issues are at the core of preparedness concerns, but we argue that political and cognitive dimensions are equally important, although often overlooked. The use of risk communication thus plays a critical role in the construction of reliable organizational response capabilities in order to face the unexpected, across all these dimensions. To understand this process, we examined the activity of a French risk manager whose objective is to support a group of municipalities in the organization of their respective organizational crisis responses. We found that to help the municipalities go beyond the limits of strictly organizational responses and engage in resilience, this manager uses the formal and technical character of the plan to generate rich cross-sectional communication that produces the conditions for resilience.

Before the Fukushima Daiichi accident in 2011, the French Institute of Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety, IRSN, was little-known to the French public. On the whole, French nuclear safety procedures are complex and the public is largely unaware of them. Moreover, communication was difficult because IRSN had to gain public trust as a result of the negative memory associated with the communication approach taken by the government in 1986 when managing the Chernobyl fallout. This communication approach led to a loss of public trust in official bodies in general. During the Fukushima Daiichi crisis, the importance of communication in such a period was largely emphasized, although France was absolutely not at risk. IRSN operations were adapted in order to explain the risks linked to this disaster to the media, companies, and French citizens. Two hundred IRSN staff members answered queries non-stop for 6 weeks, exploring the new ways of communication and interaction offered by social networks. In the years after the disaster, experts from institutions such as IRSN examined all the post-accident situations where Japanese citizens and expatriates turned to buying Geiger counters, developing new sensors to make measurements and becoming addicted to the internet to find information of all kinds, in an attempt to forge their own opinion about the importance of nuclear risks. This is the reason why IRSN developed a strategy not only to inform people with the basic useful knowledge in such situations but also to try to “empower people” by helping them to measure and share their data. The goal is to multiply the number of people aware of what radioactivity is and its associated risks, capable of measuring the level of radioactivity and interpreting it. This strategy requires communication tools and partners. IRSN is associated with IFFO RME, the French Institute of trainers on Major risks and the environment, a body with close links to the national education ministry.

Hazardous industrial areas pose major accident risks. In recent years, two innovative approaches have been used for improving accident prevention and emergency response beyond conventional regulatory requirements: the Seveso and RMP models of local involvement in state regulation. Both promote information sharing and enable direct engagement between companies and local stakeholders, and therefore involve extensive risk-related communications. The authors examine the two approaches in detail by using case studies of their application to hazardous industrial sites in Norway and the US and identify obstacles to their implementation. Nevertheless, they conclude that the approaches advance corporate social responsibility and make risk governance more democratic, respectful, and responsive to the population sectors that are most vulnerable to major industrial accidents.

Risk communication is an established concept within the risk analysis framework. It is a tool for conveying the results of the scientific assessment and management of risk, for sharing safety-related information, and exchanging views and values amongst varying stakeholder groups. Its ultimate aim is to build trust through social interaction. However, the nature of effective risk communication is yet to be fully understood and, consequently, gaps in perception about risks between experts and nonexpert remain significant. In order to address this issue and suggest how risk communication can contribute to the creation of shared awareness of the risks and benefits of nuclear energy in Japan, this chapter will show an empirical study conducted in Japan between 2011 and 2012 in the post-Fukushima accident period. In the study, scientists explained nuclear safety and health effect of radiation to local residents evaluated from radiation-affected areas in Fukushima. It concludes that a carefully designed risk communication programme can serve as an effective tool to narrow gaps in perception between experts and nonexperts about risks, and as a useful and trustworthy source of safety information for individual decision-making.

As organizations involved in the 2014–2016 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak response in West Africa are now drawing lessons from the crisis, the “manufacture of consent” (Burawoy ) emerges as an important issue. Recommendations and public health interventions developed during the response were met with suspicion and often resistances by affected populations, pushing involved organizations and actors to reflect about the validity of their risk communication tools and concepts. These difficulties stressed the numerous shortcomings of risk communication practices, which proved inefficient in an unfamiliar social and cultural context. Many reasons can be pointed-out to explain this failure to communicate risks and public health measures effectively under these circumstances. They include: unrealistic goals for communication; lack of integration of social science skills and knowledge in communication guidelines and human resources; underestimation of the breadth of communication-related tasks; over-segmentation and lack of clarity of communication concepts and expertise (risk communication, crisis communication, social mobilization, and health promotion are all but a few of these categories). Among all these possible lines of inquiry, I want to address what can arguably be considered the most fundamental flaw of crisis communication during the West African EVD episode: its inability to take into account and analyze efficiently the of the intervention.

The topic of transparency has received increasing academic interest in recent years. Transparency can be interpreted as conducting affairs in the open, being subject to public scrutiny, or admitting to problems when they arise. This chapter analyses transparency in disclosing adverse events to the public in Norway. We use the widely publicized Daniel case to show the communication between the regulator and the public, discussing key elements of transparency in the healthcare setting, including the role of media. The Daniel case describes an accidental tonsillectomy characterized by cover-up, failure of the initial regulatory and hospital follow-up, coming to a head when media shone a spotlight on the case. The media coverage caused social amplification of the risk communication resulting in regulatory follow-up having to apply new forms of transparency strategies to rebuild trust in the public. By using the Daniel case as emblematic of Norwegian risk communication strategies in health care, improvements should be made along the lines of direct and adequate information exchange according to patient rights, and efforts to foster open and transparent regulatory and organizational cultures to ensure public trust.

Commercial aviation traffic has increased so dramatically over the past decades that virtually everyone can identify him/herself to a passenger or a passenger’s relative. With the evolution of communication means and pace, every accident or incident induces an unprecedented amount of reactions and communication from many actors outside the aviation community. These newcomers on the safety communication scene challenge the historical safety management world and actors, traditionally limited to aviation professionals.

The article discusses the paradoxical foundation of a risk decision and the challenges the paradox puts on the management of risk communication. The exploration is done from a social systems theory perspective; a theory that provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for social systems and their communication processes and addresses the complexity, risk and conflicts of interests (Section ‘). From this theoretical setting, the conclusion is derived that a statement about an organization’s risk cannot be proven as a ‘true’ statement and that a receiver of an audit report (the client) will always have good reasons to question an audit team’s risk communication (Section ‘’). The article gives some hints on how an audit team can deal with clients’ needs by incorporating their requirements in its audit process, using concepts and tools from family therapy, brief therapy and systemic counselling (Section ‘’).