Risk Communication and the Role of the Public: Towards Inclusive Environmental Governance of the Baltic Sea?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on forms of and challenges for risk communication within regional environmental governance, based on an analysis of fi ve environmental risks in the Baltic Sea -marine oil transportation, chemicals, overfi shing, eutrophication and alien species. We address questions about how risks are framed and communicated and also analyse the role of communication in the governance process. Our main focus is on risk communication with the public (e.g. existing institutional arrangements and procedures of risk communication), but we also relate this analysis to discussions on communication with a broad range of actors and issues of stakeholder participation and communication. In the study we have identifi ed some examples of relatively well-working risk communication with parts of the organised public in the Baltic Sea region (BSR), such as in fi sheries or eutrophication, but also a number of different barriers and obstacles. Our key result from this study is that BSR consists of many national institutions for risk communication, but that there are hardly any centralised institutions for risk communication activities relating to environmental governance in the region. Another key conclusion is that public risk communication in this array of cross-national environmental risks is restricted mainly to (one-way) information. Against this backdrop and from our 206 empirical and theoretical knowledge of risk communication and the role of the public, we fi nally suggest some ways for improvement.

The Ecosystem Approach to Management in Baltic Sea Governance: Towards Increased Reflexivity?

“…And in general, there is a fairly big gap between ideal scenarios and practice when it comes to broad stakeholder participation and communication of environmental risk governance of the Baltic Sea (including the EU level) (Dreyer et al 2011(Dreyer et al , 2014Jönsson et al 2016 ;. From the case studies, we found scant evidence of real refl ection on and practice of participatory and communication activities.…”

“…Moreover, the need for transdisciplinary knowledge production, as well as co-production of knowledge among various types of knowledge holders needs to be acknowledged (Kemp and Loorbach 2006 ). Stakeholder inclusion is generally seen as a necessary element in refl exive governance (see also Jönsson et al 2016 ). Different actors can shed additional light on common problems.…”

“…There are many stakeholders around demanding attention. However, the structures that would facilitate fruitful coordination and deliberations among them are few, limiting and vague (see also Jönsson et al 2016 ). Existing institutions are thus inclined to exclude co-management while mechanisms of path dependency are likely to force actors to stick with 'business as usual'.…”

Conflicting Discourses on Wildfire Risk and the Role of Local Media in the Amazonian and Temperate Forests

“…Since two-way communication does not exclude oneway communication, one-way information is still predominant in the cross-national discussion of environmental public risk communication (Jönsson et al 2016). This form of risk communication is identifiable in wildfire warning systems, lectures, brochures, and news releases that aim to promote public awareness of risk.…”

Environmental Governance of the Baltic Sea: Identifying Key Challenges, Research Topics and Analytical Approaches

“…The academic literature also discusses instrumental reasons for inclusiveness (e.g. Boström 2006 ;Jönsson et al 2016 ). For example, it has been argued that inclusiveness generates new and more socially robust knowledge, stimulates mutual learning and ultimately facilitates capacity building in environmental governance.…”