论环境公共决策中风险沟通的法律实现——以预防型环境群体性事件为视角

当前我国环境群体性事件呈高发态势。根据引发事件事实状态的不同可将其分为事前预防型环境群体性事件和事后救济型环境群体性事件。预防型环境群体性事件中公众所抵制的是有关环境风险的决策结果,实质上是在主张环境公共决策过程中认知风险的权利。着眼于预防型环境群体性事件所针对的环境公共决策过程,主要运用理论分析、规范分析、比较分析的方法,从行政决策权的行使与公众参与权利的实现入手,探究环境公共决策无法取得实质合法性的根源,寻求化解之法治路径。当前环境公共决策在结构和程序上呈现出封闭性,与决策结果具有直接利害关系的公众被排除在外,其认知风险的权利得不到有效实现,风险沟通不畅导致社会可接受的风险共识不能形成,环境公共决策无法取得实质合法性,引发预防型环境群体性事件增多。由于环境风险的不确定性特征,环境公共决策中专家的理性地位被动摇,公众参与环境决策的诉求更为强烈,其对风险的认知直接决定了对最终决策结果的认可和接受程度,政府无法独占风险决策地位。在社会层面形成具体风险认知的共识以便决策结果获得普遍的认同和接受成为环境公共决策取得实质合法性的必要条件。化解预防型环境群体性事件,需要在环境公共决策过程中进行有效的风险沟通。为此,环境法应当将公众作为环境决策的合作者,要求决策者主动、全面公开决策所依据的事实和理由,对公众意见给予及时充分的回应,寻求其理解和支持;实现环境信息公开的风险沟通功能;通过程序性的设计促进风险沟通的实现,保障公众参与的有效性。当前有关立法已反映出对风险沟通的重视,但只是萌芽。     

Beyond the Choir? The Need to Understand Multiple Publics for Science

ABSTRACT

Understanding different publics for science communication is more important than ever before. The articles in this special issue lay important groundwork for our field to develop a better understanding of how audience segments differ or overlap across issues, cultural contexts, stages of the issue cycle, and different analytic and methodological approaches. The long-term goal of this work should be to enable more effective communication with publics whose demographic, socio-structural, or value-based characteristics position them squarely outside of the proverbial choir that science communication is often preaching to.     

Bearing Witness? Polar Bears as Icons for Climate Change Communication in National Geographic

This article investigates how polar bears were established as icons of climate change in the popular science magazine National Geographic. In a multistep process, anthropomorphized depictions first established polar bears as subjects of identification. Then, polar bears were visually connected to the endangered Arctic. Finally, they emerged as ambassadors of a threatened ecosystem and icons of climate change. I highlight the wider political contexts of this process of iconization and the semiotic and cultural resources on which it draws, showing what kind of climate change communication the polar bear icon enables or inhibits. The icon lends itself to being deployed in visual communication strategies creating personal concern and public awareness for climate change. At the same time, the icon fosters an individualized, emotionalized, and localized account of climate change but does not make its wider causes visible.     

Reduction of Tobacco Smoking Health Risk Through an Appropriate Media Based Communication Strategy in Uganda

The health impacts of tobacco consumption are well documented and have gained acceptance worldwide. Today, a substantial, preventable burden of tobacco attributable diseases exists in most countries, though in most of the cases, unknown. Smoking accounts for almost half of the deaths in middle age in some regions. In Uganda, translating findings into policy action is slow and involves several stakeholders. It will continue to require support from tobacco control campaign groups. This paper analyses secondar...     

Can Science Writing Collectives Overcome Barriers to More Democratic Communication and Collaboration? Lessons from Environmental Communication Praxis in Southern Appalachia

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a collective of social and natural scientists, the column is meant to foster public dialog about socio-environmental issues and to lay the groundwork for the coproduction of environmental knowledge. Our collective approach to writing addresses some major barriers to public engagement by scientists, but the need to insert ourselves as intermediaries limits these gains. Overall, our efforts at environmental communication praxis have not generated significant public debate, but they have supported future coproduction by making scientists a more visible presence in the community and providing easy pathways for them to begin engaging the public. Finally, this research highlights an underappreciated barrier to public engagement: scientists are not merely disconnected from the public, but also connected in ways that may be functional for their research. Many field scientists, for example, seek out neutral and narrowly defined connections that permit research access but are largely incompatible with efforts to address controversial issues of environmental governance.     

Places and People: Rhetorical Constructions of “Community” in a Canadian Environmental Risk Assessment

This paper addresses the issue of public engagement in environmental risk contexts through a rhetorical analysis of the key term “community” in a risk assessment of mining-caused soil contamination. Drawing on Burke's concept of terministic screens and method of cluster criticism, the analysis shows the divergent constitutions of “community” in the Sudbury Soils Study's official discourse and the citizen-activist rhetoric of the Community Committee on the Sudbury Soils Study. Tracing the verbal and visual clusters within each organization's articulation of “community” as place and people reveals how the official Study's technical-regulatory ideology of environmental risk and citizen participation is countered by the Community Committee's contestatory environmental justice ideology. These competing views of “community” are mutually constitutive in that the official Study's mainstream risk discourse establishes the terms for the Community Committee's reactive counter-discourse, thus limiting citizen participation mainly to questions of “downstream” impacts. Our rhetorical analysis of “community” suggests a generative method for understanding the complex power relations animating specific risk communication contexts as well as for potentially reinventing “community” in terms more conducive to meaningful citizen engagement.     

The Voice of Science on Climate Change in the Mainstream Turkish Press

This study aims to explore how the Turkish press represents the discourse of climate change scientists. This is achieved by analyzing climate change-related articles that quote scientists, directly and indirectly, in two Turkish mainstream newspapers (N = 132, 7 years). The Turkish case illustrates how scientific rhetoric is used for presenting climate change as a matter of concern in an industrializing country. The analysis suggests that climate science is portrayed as an un-discussed authority. News articles rely on data about the disturbance of species and the state of the natural environment to provide proof of global warming, by which they produce an implicit moral imperative. The articles also portray the worst threats and challenges—those pertaining to human society—as residing mostly in the future. We conclude by discussing the implications of the use of a projected future to convey a discourse emphasizing the alarming risks associated with climate change.     

Increasing Local Salience of Climate Change: The Un-tapped Impact of the Media-science Interface

ABSTRACT

The media play a vital role in framing the narrative on climate change, however little work exists to assess the extent to which local media outlets increase public engagement on climate change through interaction and engagement with local academics. As temperatures rise and concerns mount that we have passed the tipping point, local media play a potentially critical role in communicating how climate change exacerbates their impact. Based on a review of extant literature on this topic, and a small pilot email survey, this article argues that scientists could be more active in increasing local salience of climate change by building trusted relationships with local media. Coverage of science in the media could benefit from closer engagement with local scientists as environmental stories often get more coverage in local media (compared to national media) which constitute an important source of knowledge on climate change. This would enable constructive discussions between local media and scientists, better translation of science to publics, increased awareness and interest of science production locally, and ultimately creating a trusted intermediary in the science-public interface.