Models of Society

The debate over the risks of hazardous waste incineration has tended to focus on technical factors and neglect social and political factors. Both the Waste Management Authority and Greenpeace have tended to do this although they have divergent views of the social institutions who would be responsible for running and regulating an incinerator. Such views implicitly shape their discourse as we will show. This neglect of the social dimension is typical characteristic of the public face of technological controversies and to some extent reflects the desire of governments and experts to limit debate to areas that give mainstream groups advantage over their opposition in terms of access to information and public credibility. The willingness of Greenpeace to go along with this indicates firstly, their dependence on mainstream scientific literature; secondly their powerlessness in terms of their ability to set the agenda of the debate; and thirdly, their dependence on an international research and information base which is unable to concentrate on the local social context.

In the case of the Waste Management Authority, their neglect of the social dimension, their assumption that past record of the regulatory institutions is irrelevant, implies that they believe these institutions will behave ideally. The Waste Management Authority has consistently argued that "The incinerator will be designed to meet the toughest standards in the world for such facilities." In doing so they have employed an idealised model of legislation which downplays the social context of its implementation. In fact the implementation of standards requires an on-going interaction between competing interests such as the regulatory authority and the regulated, the nearby community and the government as well as other interested parties. It generally involves adaption, compromise and negotiation. Wynne argues that to ignore these social forces and their ability to shape the regulatory process is to relegate "downstream actors or "implementers", and associated organizational complexities, to the role of the merely mechanical (decision-less) enactment (or obstruction) of policymakers' "decisions" or rules."

In the Australian context the implementation phase tends to be all important because of the wide discretion granted to the regulatory authority. Regulatory procedures and standards tend not to be specified in the legislation but are left open for the government regulators, such as the State Pollution Control Commission in NSW, to develop and enforce as they feel is appropriate. Standards tend to be established as guidelines or objectives and are not legally enforceable. Even where they are legally enforceable, they are set in negotiation with those being regulated. Standards that are expensive or onerous to achieve are unlikely to be enforced by Australian authorities. For these reasons the equation of standards with actual performance is an idealisation.

The Swedish incinerator has often been invoked as an example of what can be achieved and as a model for the proposed Australian incinerator. The Waste Management Authority argues that background levels of dioxins and furans in the milk of cows living near the Swedish incinerator are lower than the national average and that dioxin levels in human breast milk in women in Sweden have shown a progressive reduction during the lifespan of the hazardous waste incinerator facility in that country. In like fashion, the Joint Taskforce has pointed out that the risks from incinerators in Sweden were tens of thousands of times less than the the risks from the pollution caused by car exhausts, wood-burning stoves and industries in Sweden.

The choice of the Swedish incinerator as a model involves a number of interesting, related assumptions. First, that the levels of dioxin in Sweden are causally related to the performance of their incinerators, especially the hazardous waste incinerator. Secondly, that the difference between the performance of incinerators in different countries can be accounted for by differences in technology rather than differences in social context. And third, that technologies are transferable from country to country without adaption to social context. The authorities have assumed that an Australian incinerator would perform as well as the modern Swedish incinerator which has a better environmental record than many other incinerators in Britain or the US. They argue that the reason incinerators operate poorly in the US and Britain is because they use outdated technology and Australia will not have that problem because it will be adopting the most up to date incinerator technology.

No credence is given to the possibility that the socio-political context in Sweden may lead to such factors as more careful operation and tougher regulation of their incinerator than occurs in the United States or might occur in Australia.

Wynne argues that although social assumptions shape expert risk analysis this is not done deliberately to bias the outcome. Rather it is "more a reflection of the structural role of scientists in the decision-making system, along with the narrowness of scientific education." This raises the question of the extent to which the models of technology and society being portrayed through risk communication are consciously and deliberately chosen to further the communicator's interests or conversely the extent to which they reflect "less conscious 'deeper' identifications with different social institutions, cultural styles" Might not these models be unreflectingly accepted by the communicators who have been socialised to accept particular versions of reality without too much reflection?

In terms of the portrayal of technology, it is unlikely that the engineers so prominent in the Waste Management Authority are unaware of the discrepancies between how a technological system is designed and how it operates in the real world, and, what follows from this - the scope there is for accidents. The Institution of Engineers, Australia has openly recognised that engineers have tended to portray an idealistic view of what they can achieve. A paper circulated to engineers at the end of 1990 titled 'Are You At Risk? Managing Expectations' came up with this intriguingly-worded piece of wisdom:

We know (or should know) that our models are limited in their ability to represent real systems, and we use (or should use) them accordingly. The trouble is that we are so inordinately proud of them that we do not present their limitations to the community, and leave the community with the impression that the models are precise and comprehensive...

This (veiled) admission notwithstanding, anyone concerned to promote an unpopular or controv-ersial technology often finds that the naive view of it is far more reassuring than a more realistic image. What follows is that in risk commu-

ication with the public, there is a strong, indeed irresistible, temptation to employ the more naive model. However, perhaps the same cannot be said for social models since engineers are not more critical about the working of society, and perhaps a good deal less so, than other middle-class professional members of society. In Australia, engineering education lacks any sociological/psychological training and often it is students who lack people-oriented skills that choose engineering as a career. Engineers are often criticised for neglecting the human dimensions of their designs, for not taking account of how people behave under stress and how long it takes people to process information, to respond to that information. Moreover, engineers and bureaucrats as public servants are likely to take a more optimistic view of how reliable and trustworthy government institutions are than outsiders would.

Whilst the Waste Management Authority and to a lesser extent Greenpeace, Australia neglect the social control aspect of the incinerator, the communities likely to be affected do not. Wynne has shown, through a number of case studies, that, the public make rational assessments of risk based on the ways in which those risks are controlled; "this includes institutional judgements of the performance, attitudes, openness and overall 'social demeanour' of the relevant industries and regulatory bodies" People make these judgements by looking at the past behaviour of the firms and government authorities involved.

This is certainly true in this case as well. The natural inclinations of many of the people living in targetted areas is to assume that government authorities are trustworthy and to align themselves with the conservative government rather than with "greenies". Rural people in NSW have traditionally voted conservatively and have often conflicted with environmentalists over their use of agricultural chemicals. Their level of trust in the government has probably been higher than the average for the population as a whole. Many have found the alliance with Greenpeace difficult. Those leading the campaigns against the incinerator have used Greenpeace for information but have preferred not to have Greenpeace representatives speak at their rallies and public meetings for fear of alienating their local communities.

Despite these inclinations these communities have united strongly against the proposed incinerator and have come to distrust the authorities who are trying to site the incinerator. They are more inclined to take on Greenpeace's version of the incinerator than the government's. This can be partly explained by the tendency of those who are most likely to be affected by a technology, being more concerned about what might go wrong than with what might go right with it. But this tendency has been reinforced by the unintended and inadvertent communications of the government itself which have conveyed messages about both the safety of an incinerator and the institutional behaviour of the organisations responsible for constructing, operating, monitoring and regulating a hazardous waste incinerator near them.

UNINTENDED MESSAGES

The decision to site the incinerator in rural NSW hundreds of kilometres from the main source of the waste in Sydney conveyed a powerful message to rural people that the incinerator was too dangerous to be sited near so many people in Sydney and this was the message that spoke loudest to them. The Taskforce has tried to explain the decision as follows:

The Taskforce is convinced that there is no technical reasons why the incinerator cannot be sited in the same way as any other industrial plant of a similar type. This has been done successfully overseas. However, it is likely that the public in general would prefer the distance separating the facility from residential areas to be greater than would be acceptable for more familiar industrial plants of a similar type. This is likely to rule out its location in a congested, fully-developed industrial area.

Other siting criteria also communicate hazard to the community. The Taskforce said that within a buffer zone of about 1 km radius, "there should be no supply offtake of urban or town water, supply, for irrigation, or for intensive agricultural purposes." It has also stated that for a combination of technical and perception considerations it is essential the site "be away from environmentally sensitive areas such as wetlands, national parks and significant streams and lakes". The people of Corowa, seven hundred kilometres from Sydney, were particularly incensed when their area was chosen in October1990 by the Taskforce as the preferred site for an incinerator since the location was less than 2 km from the Murray River, one of Australia's major waterways supplying drinking and irrigation water to three states. "Is the Murray not a significant waterway?" they asked government officials at an angry public meeting. The failure of those officials to give what locals considered to be an adequate answer to this and other questions communicated more to the audience than all the purposeful, reassuring statements they made all evening.

When the government finally backed down on Corowa as a site in November 1990, stating that it was unsuitable due to its proximity to the Murray River and a large number of wells, it too communicated more, to the people living near other nominated incinerator sites, about the dangers of an incinerator than any environmentalist's conscious statement could have done. The contradiction between official statements of reassurance and other less conscious statements of risk does nothing to reinforce trust in the government.

Otway and Wynne say of this type of inadvertent communication; "This tacit organizational 'body language' may trigger quite legitimate inferences about risks and their management, which are more powerful than any carefully designed formal communication." In fact the Taskforce's three-year public consultation process ended up conveying to targetted local communities the impression that they were to be sacrificial lambs and that the government and its bureaucracy could not be trusted to do the right thing by them.

The Taskforce sought to direct and shape the debate and for this purpose it hired the firm Community Projects P/L, which had already smoothed the way for other controversial projects. The Taskforce publicly stated that "By providing a framework for public involvement, the form and direction of this involvement can be managed in the public interest."

Before nominating any preferred sites for the incinerator, the Taskforce and its consultants attempted to gain broad public support for the incinerator in principle. The Taskforce endeavoured to have the public debate about the incinerator take place without input from the people who would be most directly affected, the local residents. It stated that it wanted to achieve "active public recognition that the proposal is in the public interest" by limiting "destructive conflict" and ensuring that the concerns of vested interests and affected individuals "do not frustrate the public interest." Support was particularly sought from environmental and community interest groups. Then local councils were approached. Some Councils did express interest on the basis of information given to them by the Taskforce and without referring the question to the broader populace but as soon as these areas appeared on a public short-list of sites, public reaction was hostile and all Council support was withdrawn.

The conducting of the consultation process by the Taskforce before the selection of a site was a way of attempting to control the risk communication process, socially constructing the debate and denying access to it of the people to be targetted. When the Taskforce went out to invite submissions from local residents in country areas, its carefully worded messages cleverly left out the word incinerator. For example in a letter to various media outlets the Taskforce asked them to broadcast a message inviting submissions. It stated "An Independent taskforce, set up to advise the Commonwealth, New South Wales and Victorian Governments on the Minimisation and Management of Intractable Waste, is seeking public comment on its latest findings and recommendations..." When community groups in Corowa (the first site chosen by the Taskforce for the incinerator) received letters similarly worded inviting them to a public meeting, few bothered to attend, not realising it had anything to do with a hazardous waste incinerator being put in their neighbourhood. Corowa residents claim that invitations were sent to business groups, community service groups and councillors but not to local environmental groups in town.

When the site was announced, their claims that they had not been consulted were denied by the Taskforce which pointed to these invitations and media announcements. However the damage was done. The people of Corowa and of the other shortlisted sites felt that they had been excluded from the consultation process and that this facility was being hoisted on them involuntarily.

There is also some evidence that messages of reassurance inadvertently communicate insincerity and dishonesty. The contradictions and incongruities that arise from the need to reassure rather than openly inform, some of which were covered in the previous two sections, are easily picked up by those who are likely to be most affected and are amplified by opponents. For example, the government supporters were not averse to beating up the dangers of storing the wastes whilst downplaying the dangers of transporting them:

"intractable waste, either stored or dispersed represents an unacceptable risk to us all, either through the danger of food chain contamination or the risk of uncontrolled warehouse fires."

Yet when discussing transport they claimed that the amounts of waste to be moved would be "extremely small, compared to the enormous quantities of hazardous new products" safely transported each day."

It is only when these materials become "wastes" that they are suddenly perceived as environmentally threatening and a safety or transport hazard. This is a fallacy. Wastes are no more (and frequently less) hazardous than original products.

Neither side is altogether consistent. Greenpeace is not averse to invoking the concept of the ideal technological system. "For hazardous wastes currently held in storage (e.g. Australia) treatment systems must be developed that do not emit any toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative compounds into the surrounding environment." Yet Greenpeace could afford to be inconsistent because it was not asking the local residents to rely upon it, but rather supplying arguments that they could use if they wished.

An idealised portrayal of a technology is easily discredited and only has appeal to those who want to be reassured. The Councils who put forward expressions of interest in the incinerator on the basis of the glowing reports of the Taskforce ambassadors only needed to realise that there was another side to the story, that safety issues were not so clear cut as had been portrayed, to feel duped. In this context reassurance can backfire and be interpreted as salesmanship or even dishonesty and trust is destroyed. When questioned over his about-face on the incinerator on ABC Radio, Shire President, Keith Barber, claimed that he had accepted a Taskforce report about the incinerator but had subsequently become aware of opposing expert views about the incinerator's safety. He argued that the Shire Council had not been given enough information.

Almost all writers on the topic of risk communication stress the importance of trust. Most also recognise that the acknowledgement of uncertainties is an important element of this. Hance and his colleagues advise that "Learning to say "I don't know" may be one of the most difficult risk communication lessons." However, as they also point out, trying to cover up uncertainties leaves government authorities extremely vulnerable, especially if there are environmentalists ready and eager to uncover them. Thus, a real dilemma for communicators. As Krimsky and Plough point out, making scientific uncertainty explicitly can "reinforce anxiety and reduce the public's confidence". However, if the opposition is going to do it anyway, the frank admission of uncertainties is more likely to foster trust in the communicators.

The focus for most people studying risk communication has been on the ability of the communicator to instil trust in the communicator. The aspect that is too often forgotten and yet far more important, if a technology is to be accepted, is the need for the public to trust the people who will construct, operate and regulate the technology. A US study has found that people surveyed about their reactions to a technology frequently made the point that even if the technology was flawless, "the people executing the plan and managing the technology would inevitably create serious problems." A history of unsafe industrial practices, chemical spills, problem coverups and poor regulation will communicate more to a community than any technical presentation, no matter how honest and credible. A Sydney environmentalist who favours the establishment of an incinerator in principle but has doubts about how it would be operated in practice points out:

Conservationists ... believe that governments themselves are creating fears about waste and other chemical issues by their unnecessary secretiveness, poor record of control and failure to initiate a genuine process of consultation... On a range of technical/public health issues, both state and federal governments' responses to problems involving chemicals has been weak, indecisive and unconvincing.

The old adage that actions speak louder then words, needs to be considered with respect to risk communication.

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