Abstract
Since the first edition in November 2011 initiated by ICRP, 25 Fukushima dialogue meetings have been held in 12 different municipalities of the Fukushima Prefecture. Based on the Belarus experience in the 1990s and 2000s as part of the rehabilitation of living conditions in the territories contaminated by the Chernobyl accident, the dialogue meetings are offering a fair and transparent forum to share concerns, values and opinions in mutual respect and equal opportunity not only between local residents, but also with experts, government officials, and people from various groups and organisations from Japan and abroad. The Fukushima Dialogue clearly underlined that beyond the fear of radiation, the challenge after a nuclear accident is to empower the affected people to allow them to gradually acquire a practical culture of radiation protection helping them to regain their dignity and project themselves again into the future. The dialogue meetings emphasised that technical risk communication, however precise and substantiated it may be, is not sufficient to address the questions and concerns of those affected by the accident in a context of distrust.
INTRODUCTION
Until the mid-1980s, decisions related to risky activities were taken based on risk assessment and management without involving and communicating with the public. The fields of risk perception and risk communication research were developed during the 1990s to find ways of bridging the public/expert risk perception gap related to activities raising concerns in society (nuclear energy, chemical industry, etc.). Building on Paul Slovic's pioneering work on risk perception (Slovic, 2001), Baruch Fischhoff developed the basic principles of risk communication (Fischhoff, 1995). Despite all the advances in risk research during the 1990s, decision-making processes and regulatory approaches related to hazardous activities continued to face growing opposition from stakeholders at local and national levels. This situation led researchers and experts in the field of risk assessment and management to analyse in detail the problematic risk situations in order to identify the blocking factors. They identified that the technical approach to risk management is a necessary but not sufficient condition for making effective decisions on risk because people are disappointed, worried, discontented, even angry, and have doubts about experts and authorities or simply do not trust them. These findings led to the development of a new approach for managing risk activities called risk governance. Risk governance goes beyond traditional risk assessment and management to include the involvement and participation of the concerned stakeholders as well as considerations of the legal, political, economic, and social contexts in which a given risk is evaluated and managed. Research on risk governance highlighted particularly the fundamental role of social trust in the decision-making processes related to risk management. In the field of radiological risk, experts and professionals are often confronted with situations in which stakeholders and members of the public involved have only a very limited knowledge of radiation, are worried about their potential effects, and are rather suspicious of institutions and the people in charge of managing these situations. The experience of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents has shown the importance of promoting and facilitating dialogue between all stakeholders to manage the risk.
The aim of this article is to present the lessons learned from the Fukushima Dialogue, which took place during the decade following the Fukushima accident, in terms of risk communication. This Dialogue, initiated by ICRP and which has had 25 editions to date, integrates the concepts of ‘two-way communication’, with the aim of ‘citizen participation’ and ‘trust-building’, in the interests of efficiency and fairness. The first part of the article briefly recalls the context in which the Dialogue emerged and then its main characteristics and its evolution over time. The second part of the article highlights how the Dialogue is a form of two-way communication that complements the classical technical risk communication.
THE FUKUSHIMA DIALOGUE
The emergence of the Fukushima Dialogue
Following the International Expert Symposium on Radiation and Health Risks held in Fukushima on 11-12 September 2011, a group of ICRP members, including both foreign and Japanese experts, met 2 days later in Tokyo. A representative of the Radiation Safety Forum Japan (RSFJ) NPO presented the early decontamination works performed by the NPO in Date City with the involvement of local stakeholders. During the discussion, the difficulty of establishing cooperation between all concerned parties (authorities, experts, local community professionals, and affected residents) was underlined (Lochard, 2016).
The same group met 2 weeks later in Belarus for a long-planned mission, which aimed to bring together Japanese members with national authorities and experts in Minsk, as well as local experts, professionals, and residents of the Bragin District severely affected by the Chernobyl accident, to better understand the challenges of the postaccident situation. During their various visits and meetings, they learned about the key role of stakeholder dialogue under the ETHOS project and the CORE programme for the rehabilitation of living conditions in the affected areas in the late 1990s and the 2000s. This experience has shown that an effective dialogue between experts, authorities, and affected people is an incentive for the latter to involve themselves effectively in the recovery process and to gradually regain control of the situation they are facing. To be successful, such dialogue requires that some experts and authorities who master radiological risk make a long-term commitment to address the questions and concerns of the affected population.
Back in Japan, the Japanese members decided to propose a dialogue meeting in Fukushima to all interested parties, modelled on the Belarusian experience, to discuss the challenges of the long-term rehabilitation of living conditions in the affected territories of Fukushima Prefecture.
The characteristics of the dialogue meetings
The organisation and conduct of the dialogue meetings (invited participants, local and international observers, facilitation by ICPR members, use of a common language, presence of the media, specific scenography, and simultaneous translation into English) have been described in detail by Lochard et al. (2019).
Relying on facts to ensure a scientific approach but also on the ethical values underpinning the system of radiological protection, the dialogue meetings are facilitated in a spirit of mutual respect and fairness, transparency, and openness. By privileging storytelling and attentive listening and by imposing no direction, the objective is to encourage the expression of the diversity of points of view and to allow everyone the possibility of forming their own opinion on the guiding theme of each dialogue meeting.
A key feature of the Dialogue is the use of a facilitating technique to ensure fair and constructive exchanges among participants. Given the special conditions, particularly the time constraint in which the dialogue meetings take place, a simplified and adapted version of the so-called IDPA method has been used since the third meeting. More information on the origin and the practical conditions of implementation of this method has been recently published (Lochard et al., 2023).
The aim of the IDPA method is to gather the expertise of many actors, where everybody is considered an expert with his/her own knowledge. It then determined the conditions and means by which the issue at stake could be supported by all concerned actors. The basis of this approach is the idea that actors who directly experience a problem can make a crucial contribution to understanding what is at stake in that problem and to addressing it effectively. Unlike traditional survey methods, the primary purpose of the IDPA method is not to collect opinions or measure attitudes but to build strategic thinking. The participants are not placed in the passive posture of subjects from whom one tries to extract information and opinions, but in the active role of experts on the problem they are confronted with. In any group of people confronted with complex and risky situations and gathered for some discussion, participants experience fragmentation, alienation, and the conflicts that exist in a society that are just waiting to rise. The collision of opposite views gives rise to negative reactions and emotions. The IDPA method is designed to help stakeholders express their views about the situation at stake, confront them, and then search for a shared understanding of the key problems characterising the situation (Lochard et al., 2023).
The 25 dialogue meetings held so far took place in 12 municipalities of the Fukushima Prefecture covering almost all aspects of post-accident situations (see Table 1). First initiated and organised by ICRP during 2 days with the help of RSFJ and ETHOS in Fukushima NPOs and the financial support from IRSN, NRPA, and CEPN, they continued to be organised by a group of local stakeholders with one day of local visit and one day combining testimonies and an IDPA session with the financial support of the Nippon Foundation. Since 2021, the dialogue meetings have been entirely in the hands of the NPO Fukushima Dialogue continuing with the same format. Altogether, it is estimated that more than 600 different individuals participated in the 25 Dialogues (NPO Fukushima Dialogue, 2024).
Titles, dates, and locations of the 25 dialogue meetings held so far.
Titles, dates, and locations of the 25 dialogue meetings held so far.
Communication on radiological risk in the context of a nuclear accident faces three major obstacles: the lack of basic knowledge and experience about radiological risk among the affected people; the high level of their concern, worry, anxiety, fear, and anger; and their widespread mistrust of authorities and experts as a result of the accident. Experiences of Chernobyl and Fukushima have confirmed that in such a context the diffusion of scientific and technical information plays a limited role in helping people to understand the situation, to make informed decisions, and to regain trust in authorities and experts.
As underlined by risk communication research, when people are destabilised in the event of an accident, they have difficulties hearing, understanding, and remembering the information given to them, and they integrate it at a level well below their usual level of understanding. They also tend to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects and are very sensitive to aspects that affect trust, fairness, and what they are able to control themselves. Above all, they want their concerns to be heard and taken seriously into account (Covello, 2011). Moreover, this information coming from various voices is contradictory and often amplified by the media. These observations led risk governance researchers to consider two types of risk communication approaches: technologically oriented ones relying on information, knowledge, and performance, which are more appropriate for education and training, and cooperation and solidarity-based ones relying on shared values, cooperation, community building, and democratic processes. They also emphasised as noted earlier that this second type of risk communication approach must rely on social trust and stakeholder engagement (Renn, 1999).
As far as social trust is concerned, risk researchers emphasised the distinction between sharing information that has only performance implications versus sharing information that has moral implications such as the one that contains social, political, or ethical values. They thus explained why technically oriented risk communication (which is a confidence-based approach) has a very limited impact in case of distrust and noted that as long as the social system is stable, shared confidence in performances can supply the necessary foundation for daily life. However, when the system becomes unstable or is destabilised, confidence is lost, and trust is required to provide a transition to a new, stable state (Earle et al., 2007).
The challenge of risk communication in this context is to take into account both the technical aspects related to the control of exposures but also the human factors characterising the particular situation to which people are confronted (Murakami and Sato, 2017). Thus, to be effective, risk communication must also be contextualised, i.e. respond to the concerns of those affected and to the specific challenges of each community.
By bringing and sharing together various skills and sensibilities with the aim of identifying the real concerns and expectations of people, the Dialogue abolishes the duality between the experts and the laymen, i.e. those who know and those who do not. It is a space to share freely and openly experiences and for everyone to listen to different viewpoints and opinions on the situation. A key function of the Dialogue is to give the opportunity to each participant to put her/himself in the shoes of others. The use of common language and narrative facilitates the sharing of each person's intimate experience, the revelation of the richness of sense of the situation, and also allows each one to revisit their values and aspirations and affirm their identities. The diversity of views of the participants facilitates understanding the complexity of the situations they face as well as the search for solutions.
The Dialogue meetings have clearly confirmed that the challenge of risk communication in postaccident situation is to empower affected people about the radiation risk, i.e. to help them to know where, when, and how they are exposed to radiation, to understand which situations deserve to take actions, and to take informed decisions to protect themselves and their loved ones to progressively rebuilt the indispensable trust between the local authorities, experts, and professionals for the living together. Experience has shown that technically oriented risk communication alone is not sufficient to overcome these challenges.
The basis of this approach is the idea that actors who directly experience a complex situation can make a crucial contribution to understanding this situation. The successive meetings have highlighted the key role of listening and sharing the diverse, and sometimes divergent, points of view of the participants in mutual respect and equal opportunity as an effective way for them to form their own opinion of the situation and thus get out of the vagueness in which they had been until the accident. The Dialogue meetings demonstrated that the best way to express views and concerns about the situation was to rely on testimonies and narratives of participants related to their daily life in order to establish a concrete link between the radiological situation they are facing and their activities and behaviour. Dialogue meetings have so far enabled participants to exchange and discuss topics that affect them more or less directly in their confrontation with radioactivity. Although they are not intended to prepare decisions relating to the protection of people and the environment, the issue of radiation risk is however omnipresent in the background of the exchanges between the participants. If the major concern in the years following the accident was mainly focused on the protection against radiation, over time, the recovery issues took precedence.
Finally, several lessons can be drawn from the Fukushima Dialogue meetings for risk communication. They confirmed that it is more important to exchange and share opinions on the basis of the feelings of the participants, vis-à-vis the complex and stressful situations with which they are confronted, than to exchange directly on the risk itself. Without combining it with ethical values linked to social justice, precautionary measures, human dignity, and the daily practical experience of those who reside in the affected areas, the expert discourse remains abstract and does not make sense and reassure participants. The Fukushima Dialogue clearly underlined that beyond the fear of radiation, what is at stake is the dignity of affected people. By mainly focusing on the risk, exchanges between experts and affected people tend to become impersonal, encourage withdrawal into oneself, and promote distrust. The objective of the Dialogue is to establish a relationship between the concerned people and the experts based on empathy and attentive listening so that people do not feel objectified. It is also to help experts to think about their practice and to question the meaning of the concerns and expectations of the affected people taking into account the prevailing circumstances. The goal of the participating experts is not to be right or to impose a point of view but to empower affected people so that they make informed decisions. To ensure the success of the dialogue, experts must listen carefully and demonstrate mutual respect, empathy, and sincere humility.
The dialogue is not at all about rejecting science, but about ensuring that all dimensions of the problem, including the scientific ones, are taken into account. As the accident calls into question, or even modifies, the social identity of the affected people, their places of life and their habits, by telling their stories, they gradually reinforced their self-esteem and ultimately their ability to act. Images and metaphors used by stakeholders in telling stories are powerful ways of saying oneself and expressing one's relationship to others and the world around them.
The dialogue is based on the idea that people have stories to tell and that by telling them they can reinsert the traumatic episode they experienced as a break in the continuity of their lives. Beyond the objective to establish a relationship between experts and stakeholders based on empathy, attentive listening, and the ability to understand everyone's concerns, the Dialogue helps to overcome the focus on risk and to more deeply understand the situation the participants are facing as well as their concrete concerns.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Initiated by ICRP, pursued by a group of people animated by the will to work tirelessly for the rehabilitation of the quality of life in the Fukushima Prefecture, the Dialogue, which is now in the hands of the NPO Fukushima Dialogue, has demonstrated the effectiveness of inclusive risk communication. The successive dialogue meetings made a significant contribution to the understanding of the issues of the postaccident situation in Fukushima. They allowed to better understand the difficult dilemma of whether affected people should stay or leave, return or not in the affected areas, as well as the societal consequences of the accident, including the discrimination against people, products, and areas. The crucial role of measurements of radiation levels and individual exposures to communicate and involve people in the recovery process was emphasised regularly, as well as the importance of respecting ethical values in the development of the recovery process.
The Dialogue gave rise to rich testimonies, particularly as regards the human dimension of the accident, which will be a precious legacy of the people of Fukushima for improving preparedness and supporting affected people in case of a nuclear accident in the future. The lessons of the Fukushima Dialogue should certainly be applied to exposure situations other than postaccident ones. However, there is a significant need to train experts so that they develop their empathy skills and also master the facilitation methods essential to the success of dialogues with stakeholders.
Based on what we learned during the dialogue meetings, we must definitely move away from the idea that risk communication is just a matter of sound technical information to be passed to people. The dialogue meetings emphasised that technical risk communication, however precise and substantiated it may be, is insufficient to address the questions and concerns of those affected by the accident in a context of distrust. To be effective, risk communication with the public requires dialogue and storytelling (Lochard et al., 2023).
Finally, it is to note that the importance of the Dialogue has been recognised by the Japanese authorities through letters of appreciation given to ICRP by the Ministry of the Environment and the Fukushima Prefectural Government in February 2018 and that the lessons of the dialogue meetings have been largely incorporated into ICRP Publication 146, which provides recommendations on the protection of people and the environment in the event of a large nuclear accident issued in 2020 (ICRP, 2020).