The Columbia River Comprehensive Impact Assessment: Technocraticand Community Conceptions of Risk. A. T. Guglielmo and T. M. Leschine, CRESP and School of Marine Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Conducting risk assessments for environmental hazards in ways that embrace both scientific norms and public values and expectations remains an elusive goal. This paper examines a recent DOE attempt at participatory risk assessment, the Columbia River Comprehensive Impact Assessment (CRCIA). Our evaluation focuses on the nature of the discourse that occurred among participants in terms of two basic procedural elements, "fairness" and "competence." Plutonium for nuclear weapons was produced at Hanford from 1945 until 1987. CRCIA’s purpose was to determine Hanford’s impacts on the Columbia River and those human and ecological communities dependent on it. The year-and-a-half long CRCIA process resulted in the emergence of two distinct and conflicting conceptions of risk. The technocratic view of risk manifested itself in a scoping-level risk assessment designed to satisfy needs of the CERCLA remedy selection process. The community view of risk, as constructed by tribal, stakeholder and non-DOE agency representatives, led to a framework identifying the analytic components necessary for a truly "comprehensive" impact assessment. This framework broadened the standard risk assessment model by fundamentally altering the concepts of receptor and effect. The CRCIA Team was never able to reconcile these two conceptions, a result which can be partially attributed to procedural weaknesses. Several lessons can be drawn from this case: formalized decision rules and dispute resolution mechanisms are crucial for the integration of different types of discourse, careful attention is required to power relations among the parties involved, and independent technical assistance is necessary to bridge the disconnect that occurs between normative and technical information.
Work supported by CRESP through Department of Energy Cooperative Agreement #DE-FC01-95EW55084.
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