SRA-E Lisbon 2017

Since the early 1980s, multi-disciplinary efforts have been made to formulate universal risk and safety approaches. Advice on how to best communicate risks has been an integral part of this development. In Europe, however, the appeal of risk-based approaches varies according to context. For instance the probabilistic models adopted in the UK and the Netherlands have been avoided by French regulators outside the nuclear sector because they challenge the primacy of elected institutions. How do national approaches to risk analysis influence risk communication? Do they also imply distinctive ‘’national styles of risk communication’’? In 2015 the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment commissioned a study to Maastricht University to test their latest holistic framework (Explicitly Dealing with Safety) among the risk-scientific community. We obtained formal feedback on the framework from a panel of 21 risk scientists as well as informal feedback from a much larger cohort. The concepts and ideas contained in the report offer valuable insights into how the Dutch environment agency envisage risk communication and how they deal with concrete cases. The analysis and feedback received points to distinctive patterns of risk communication à-la-Dutch that sometime follow and sometime depart from ‘’universal’’ risk communication principles.