Citizen-Expert Collaborative Process for Risk Analysis. Audrey Armour, Associate Dean and Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele St., North York, Ontario, Canada, M3J 1P3; Phone (416)736-5252; Fax (416) 736-5679; e-mail armoura@yorku.ca
The use of risk assessment in public policy making can be traced back several centuries to the efforts made by public health officials to predict life expectancy and the probability of death from various life-threatening diseases. It came into full stride in the late 1960s, largely in response to growing societal concern about the pervasive and often unanticipated consequences of new technologies, industrial processes and large-scale engineering project. But there is stiff a long way to go to develop effective means of addressing environmental risk in public policy making processes. To date, the emphasis has been placed on the science of risk assessment in the hope that science and scientists will provide the needed answers to arbitrate risk-related issues and disputes. However, experience has revealed that the way in which risk assessors approach an environmental risk problem and the way in which policy makers and other lay people make risk management decisions are quite different. As a result, risk assessment studies have often proven to be disappointing, for everyone involved, and sometimes more of a hindrance than a help. Indeed, they can be counterproductive, exacerbating rather than allaying fears and fuelling rather than resolving socio-political conflict.
It is beginning to be recognized that there is a need to broaden the concept of risk assessment from the perception that it is essentially a scientific matter to encompass the notion of risk as a matter for social dialogue and to direct more effort towards putting in place the socio-political infrastructure to facilitate such dialogue. This paper will discuss the results of an experiment which attempted to accomplish these objectives. It will present a case study in which citizens played the lead role in setting criteria for assessing the risk associated with the decommissioning and cleanup of low level radiaoactive waste disposal sites and in determining how "the risk" should be analyzed. The case study offers interesting insights into how to structure the process of risk assessment so that scientists and citizens are able to work together as a team rather than, as is so often the case, confront each other as adversaries.
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