The STRATEGY project (Sustainable Restoration and Long-Term Management of Contaminated Rural, Urban and Industrial Ecosystems) aimed to provide a holistic decision framework for the selection of optimal restoration strategies for the long-term sustainable were identified. The importance of stakeholder consultation at a local level and of ensuring that any response is site and scenario specific were emphasised. A value matrix approach was suggested as a method of addressing social and ethical issues within the decision-making process, and was designed to be compatible with both the countermeasure compendia and the decision support system. The applicability and usefulness of STRATEGY outputs for food production systems in the medium to long term is assessed.
-Recommendations and requirements for the management of foodstuffs including drinking water and feedstuffs (but not other commodities) contaminated after a nuclear accident or a radiological event have been developed by international bodies such as Codex Alimentarius Commission or European Union as well as by individual countries. However, the experience from severe nuclear accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and less serious radiological events, shows that the implementation of such systems (based on criteria expressed in activity concentration) seems to be not fully suitable to prevent several difficulties such as, for instance, stigmatization and even rejection attitudes from consumers or retailers (anticipating the fears of consumers). To further investigate the possible strategies and stakeholder expectations to deal with this sensitive issue, a study has been launched within the European research project PREPARE-WP3. The overall objective of this work, coordinated is to contribute to the development of strategies, guidance and tools for the management of the contaminated products, taking into account the views of producers, processing and retail industries and consumers. For this purpose, 10 stakeholder panels from different European countries have been set up. In addition, feedback experience from the management of contaminated goods following the Fukushima accident has been provided by Japanese stakeholders. This paper highlights the key topics tackled by the different European stakeholders' panels.
Nuclear emergencies confront decision‐makers, emergency actors and publics with several challenges, many of which are related to social, ethical and communication aspects. Based on empirical data from three European countries, this paper investigates citizens' potential behaviour in an emergency situation. It analyses relationships between self‐assessed compliance with protective actions and a number of variables, including knowledge about protective actions, trustworthiness of communicators, perceived social norm (expectation of other residents' behaviour), perceived effectiveness and perceived difficulty of protective actions. Results suggest that most respondents expect to follow actions advised by authorities, except for leaving children at school or avoiding the use of phones. Moreover, large fractions of local and wider publics may seek to avoid risks by rejecting food produced in affected areas even when it satisfies legal norms or taking iodine tablets when not needed. Self‐assessed compliance with protective actions is positively correlated with perceived social norm, perceived effectiveness and compliance with other actions; and negatively correlated with perceived difficulty. Higher trust in the regulator is associated with higher compliance with some actions, but mostly among the local populations. We argue that clarifying and anticipating societal concerns contributes to enhancing societal resilience and the response to nuclear accidents.
The idea of public or stakeholder engagement in governance of science and technology is widely accepted in many policy and academic research settings. However, this enthusiasm for stakeholder engagement has not necessarily resulted in changes of attitudes toward the role of stakeholders in the dialogue nor to the value of public knowledge, practical experience, and other inputs (like salient questions) vis-à-vis expert knowledge. The formal systems of evaluation of the stakeholder engagement activities are often focused on showing that the method is efficient and works. In this article, we argue that every stakeholder engagement process should be evaluated beyond a simple assessment of the methodology and that the wider context of the stakeholder engagement activity should also be addressed. We evaluate two different stakeholder engagement activities against the existing method evaluation criteria and demonstrate their limitations for assessing the quality of a stakeholder engagement. We argue that these criteria need to be extended so that engagement processes will have a chance to improve not only policies but also their democratic legitimacy.
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