14-1190b-innovation-managing-risk-evidence

adioactive waste in many countries (though not all,
as is the case in France, Sweden, and Canada). In the
United Kingdom, the decision track-ways are littered
with frustrated consultations, innumerable public surveys,
reports by countless advisory bodies and reinventions of
inconsistent regulation. At its heart lies a combination of a
broad public recognition that there is a legacy of civilian and
military nuclear waste that must eventually be disposed of,
and an unsuccessful series of attempts to achieve an agreed
resting site. Meanwhile the wider public enjoys the benefits
of reliable base load electricity whilst expecting some
particular community or other to absorb the disruption
of traffic and possible danger of being neighbour to a deep
repository of waste that is hot and treacherous unless
wholly contained for over 25,000 years.
Here the government is listening to the kinds of
arguments outlined above. It is facing five critical issues.
One is that there can be no approved deep disposal site
without agreement over a range of decision-making bodies
from national government through regional and local
government to the parishes and communities voluntarily
selected. A second is that the relative risks of permanent
above-ground storage, especially for generations a long
way into the distance, should be fully compared. A third
is that planning procedures should suitably combine
national guidelines with local safeguards. A fourth is that
any discussion of community benefits should be additional
to the direct financial benefits or incentives to the willing
community arising from the investment and jobs creation.
But if such benefits are also to address the scope for
recognizing community pride in carrying responsibility for
guaranteeing the long-term safety of this facility on behalf
of the nation, then there may have to be some sort of levy
on each unit of waste disposed. Such a levy would recognize
the potential open-endedness of the additional waste from
any new nuclear stations. It could also form a not-forprofit
community administered fund for the permanent
betterment of all future generations who are neighbours to
any selected site.
The fifth element applies to the focus of this chapter,
namely finding ways to hold a wider conversation.
Normal consultative procedures do not always work
well for this kind of long-term contentious issue, because
people often do not understand how their input into the
consultation process works. There is also the broader issue
of consultation fatigue: people do not want to keep on
saying things they think they have said many times before,
particularly when they do not know how much weight will
actually be given to their response.
One possibility is to instigate a process of decentralized
deliberation. This would be specifically designed to build
confidence and trust. Ideally, small teams of informed but
essentially local people should be trained to converse with
community groups in an empathetic approach. Training is
vital, for the overall aim is to allow all participants to debate
all issues (which they jointly establish) in terms of their
own comfortable communication, and in meeting places
that are familiar to them. Local authorities and experts
GM Nation was a
complicated drama
where a novel mix
of facts, values and
learning combined in an
unsatisfactory way.
are not ideally equipped to deal with this sort of intimate
and more genuinely representative democracy, nor do
local citizens perceive them to be so equipped. There are
lessons to be learnt from the GM debate here. Chilvers
admits that getting a more comforting and trust-building
decentralized deliberative process right is very difficult 27 . It
very much depends on the context and the characteristics
of the participants and of the decision pathways (past and
future). This extended deliberative process has to be proven
to be independent. Even then, as indicated earlier, dedicated
‘spoilers’ could subvert the most carefully designed
processes unless they are identified and isolated by the
participants whose trust in these innovative procedures has
first to be won over.
There can be no guarantee that this community-based set
of conversations will work out as intended. Much depends
on the political and regulatory setting for the generic stage
designed to reassure that there is a technological and
geological safe means of disposal somewhere in England.
But even more hangs on the mechanisms of creating a
learning and listening atmosphere throughout the country,
particularly in any locations where there is a willingness
to be considered for community benefit, and where the
deeper normative components of trusting involvement,
authentic forms of conversing, and full consideration of the
possible alternatives brings out the essence of informed and
appreciated agreement.
Two additional possible obstacles remain. One is the
apparently monolithic characteristics of the planning process,
especially where “critical infrastructure projects” are
externally labelled and treated as “in the national interest”,
thereby seeming to bypass local protest and confining it
to matters of local detail. The other is the social memories
of historical resentment and past damaging treatment, as
summarized by Bickerstaff 28 .
Such a concern with the relational geography of issues
suggests a refocusing of attention away from the presences
of controversy (the actors, framings, and outcomes), and
towards the absences that mark the roots (or routes) of
so-called ‘not in my back yard’ (‘Nimby’) disputes. It is an
69