Responsibly Managing Risks To The Environment: Stakeholders And Their Communication Contract

Abstract

The design of tools and procedures for the responsible and effective management of risks to humans and their environment is an important topic in modern environmental engineering. This article places the ethical ground clauses of a communication contract in the particular context of early hazard warnings. How respecting ethical ground clauses of communication may help avoid that the short-term economic interests of a few are placed before the long-term interests of society as a whole is explained on the basis of examples from disaster case studies. The need for rules which ensure that relevant information is effectively transmitted, received, and taken into account promptly is highlighted. Why successfully implementing such rules involves the individual responsibility of all stakeholders, from witnesses or victims to scientific experts and policy makers, is made clear. The ethical ground clauses of the communication contract introduced here provide universal rules for responsible communication, defined in terms of general guidelines for sincere, transparent, prompt, and cooperative information sharing, in particular in risk management. Earlier work has shown that implementing such a communication contract in corporate decision making helps promote stakeholder responsibility awareness, and triggers a learning process for initiating and fostering individual and collective behavior that will ultimately lead to responsible decisions and actions. These latter are the prerequisite for mitigating the potentially disastrous consequences of non-action in response to early warnings, when relevant scientific data and/or expert knowledge are not adequately taken into account because of faulty communication, identified as the major cause of delayed action in numerous case studies. Limitations of the communication contract theory are pointed out.