Risk communication at the community level: European lessons from the Seveso directive.

Reprinted from JAPCA; October 1989; Vol 39 No 10; pp1301-1307

This article explores the strategies of and the experiences with the risk communication efforts in different European countries and describes the responses to these efforts by stakeholder groups and the general public. The political adoption of risk communication programs are strongly influenced by the regulatory style of each country. Adversarial and consensual systems appear to cope better with public disclosure of information than bureaucratic, corporatist, or authoritarian systems. Because of differences in regulatory style, only few elements of the European experiences with risk communication can be transferred to the U.S. context.