EPCB applies the following principles for facilitating sound decisions.
Introduction: Teams are created for each project, thereby ensuring a versatile combination of skills and experience, to meet client needs and deliver high quality solutions. We apply practices focused on collaboration and flexibility, where ideas are shared and individual contributions are taken into account in achieving common goals.
The seven core principles we apply include:
1. Communication should be directed toward informing choices and solving problems.
2. Coping with a risk requires a broad understanding of the range of views interested and affected parties will have about relevant losses, harms, or consequences to interested and affected parties.
3. Sound risk profiling is an outcome of "analytic-deliberative" process - a key tool in EPCB's approach.
4. The analytic-deliberative process leading to a risk characterization should include early and explicit attention to problem formulation; representation of the broad spectrum of interested and affected parties at this early stage is imperative.
5. Analysis and deliberation are complementary and must be integrated throughout the process leading to risk characterization: deliberation frames analysis, analysis informs deliberation, and the process benefits from feedback between the two.
The structure of an analytic-deliberative process depends on the particular situation, but five objectives can be identified:
• Getting the right science.
• Getting the science right.
• Getting the right participation.
• Getting the participation right.
• Developing an accurate, balanced, and informative synthesis.
Click here to access the free online version of “Understanding Risk: Informing Decisions in a Democratic Society” (National Academies).
6. Those responsible for risk communication and characterization should begin by developing a provisional diagnosis of the decision situation so that they can better match the analytic-deliberative process leading to the characterization to the needs of the decision, particularly in terms of level and intensity of effort and representation of parties.
7. Each organization responsible for making risk decisions should work to build organizational capability to conform to the principles of sound risk communication and characterization. At a minimum, it should pay attention to organizational changes and staff training efforts that might be required, to ways of improving practice by learning from experience, and to both costs and benefits in terms of the organization's mission and budget.
Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication Guidelines (PDF)
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